Rise of the Smallest
by Fanatic Drone N
Summary: The Irken Empire is under assault: A poweful alien race is on the brink of destroying Irken civilization, riots are spreading across once peaceful planets, and those cupcakes are definetly poisonous...
1. Prolouge

Hello, loyal readers.

A quick note before we get the story started: I'm working extra hard on this story so PLEASE review. Seriously, I haven't gotten reviews in a while, and the number of review I get will directly affect how long I'll update this story.

Happy fanficing!

* * *

Time is a concept that we are really not too familiar with.

Let me put it in perspective: The universe began fourteen _billion_ years ago. A billion is a thousand millions.

The universe is 3500000 times older than the pyramids. It has been around longer than 200000000 human lifetimes. Eight billion years after the beginning, a massive cloud of hydrogen gas began to collapse under its own weight, eventually forming a massive lump of gas. This lump of gas was so big, that at is core the nature of matter was changed by the pressure. Two Hydrogen atoms would fuse together and become one atom of Helium. This simple reaction created so much energy, that the finer particles of the dust cloud were blown away, leaving behind bigger, rockier chunks in the middle, and some very large orbs of gas farther out. These rocky pieces collided with each other, eventually getting big enough to pull themselves into spheres, and subsequently pulling themselves into the paths of other rocks. Entire asteroids, which a few thousand million years ago would have been unimaginably large, were swallowed up whole by four enormous mini-planets that dominated this primordial solar system.

Eventually, the great gassy titans of the colder outer regions made smaller rocks go around them, and the rocks in the middle were used up. Only a thin region of rocky chaos remained, dividing the small, warm worlds from their icy brothers.

It was in this end of the era of chaos that an object the size of Mars slammed into a certain planet in the warm, inner region. This planet will become recognizable when we learn that the material ejected by this collision first formed a ring, before eventually coalescing into a large, white object that still bears the scars of is violent past. This moon, the only one to be made from its parent planet, still hangs in the sky of the planet Earth.

It is now time to get into the history of life, which began some five hundred and fifty million years after the formation of the Earth. Perhaps life began in the vast oceans, impregnated with the strange mix of chemicals that dominated the early world. Perhaps it began in great fissures in the Earth, where intense heat and strange chemicals provided the spark of life. Perhaps it rode to the planet on a meteorite. Perhaps we will never know.

All we know can know is that suddenly, the oceans were filled with fascinating, simple little orbs of chemicals that learned how to absorb simpler chemicals and make copies of themselves. The secret behind these little cells were the genes: Long, complex chains of molecules that built the cells simply with how they linked up with other cells. Now, with every copy, the genes got distorted. Perhaps, out of every hundred copies, one had a defect, and one out of every hundred defective cells had a defect that was _good_ for it.

Nevertheless, there were _trillions_ of cells, all copying and re-copying merrily for the next two and a half billion years. Those mutations which served the genes (allowed them to make more copies) were passed down to the next generation, who then began to copy in better ways. The genes waged all out war for supremacy in this early world: Cells devoured cells, cells developed defenses, and one day, the shape of the cell changed. A larger cell devoured a smaller cell, but did not digest it. Instead, it used the mini-cell to process different kinds of food for it. The two cells became one animal, dividing at the same time, serving each other for the rest of eternity.

Cells also began to join forces without eating each other: The stromatolites, great lumps of rock, began to be built up by the cyanobacteria, who discovered photosynthesis and filled the air with oxygen. Oxygen, while deadly to many early forms of life, was extraordinarily useful to a select few. And then, the genes did something incredible: They partnered up permanently. Cells now had it encoded in their genes that they must be a part of a body of other cells, all helping each other to get the food to reproduce, and help their genes to dominance.

This event changed the future of the world: These new 'bodies' wielded immense power, nearly invulnerable to their old foes. More multicolor animals developed, and a billion years after the first bodies were made, the so-called 'Cambrian Explosion' rocked the world: Jellyfish, sponges, strange water animals, and other bizarre creatures graced this early world.

Eventually, fish reigned supreme, and some of those fish lived close to shore. These fish had fins they used to push along the bottom rather than through the water. These fish could also go without water, the cradle of life, for long periods of time. Eventually, there were kinds of fish that could live both in water and on land, growing up submerged and living their adult lives hunting the insects of the land. Eventually, they learned how to take the ponds they needed to grow up in, and store them in hard shells, called eggs.

The result of this invention was the reptiles, who could spend their entire lives without seeing more water than a drop at a time. The reptile grew bigger, harnessing the sun's rays for their warmth, until a group of them could harness the fires of food for warmth. These creatures, the synapsids, represented the most ingenious development in surviving cold in all the innovations of the genes, but for the next two-hundred million years they were eclipsed by the enormous, often vicious Dinosaurs. They held unchallenged dominion over the Earth for countless eons, diversifying and propagating across the world in thousands of forms. And then a comet struck the Earth, and the Dinosaurs were dead.

Life is funny like that.

For a while, there was fierce completion between the descendants of the synapsids and Dinosaurs: The mammals and birds respectively. Each possessed an upgraded version of the reptile's scales, warmth giving fur, and lift giving feathers. For a while, the birds reigned supreme, but eventually were over competed by the little mammals, who were taking to the trees. While some used their claws and teeth to invade bird nests, others grew long arms and large brains to solve their arboreal problems.

Eventually, these monkeys took once more to the ground, bulkier and brainier. Eventually, one of these creatures lost most of their fur, grew bigger brains, and achieved the shining jewel of intelligent, rational life.

Developments came quickly now: The blink of a geologic eye that spanned a hundred thousand years suddenly saw the humans in hyper-evolution, and not using the genes. They developed a kind of claw that you could simply take off at the end of the day to better manipulate things (a knife), the gained symbiotic animals, mimicking the partner ship of cells that had so long ago changed the face of the world (the domestication of the dog); they even figured out how to get plants to bear fruit for them, and then humanity became sedentary.

Extra food meant that some members of a tribe could do other things besides forage and farm, and writing, mathematics, and philosophy appeared. By now, human kind has spread entirely around their planet, and within the space of a few thousand years, evolved strange exoskeletons which could take them huge distances in a matter of hours, developed a method of hurling death at whatever they chose, and finally unlocked the power of the genes.

Mankind today wields the power of the eons: They are making their first tentative steps into the world of genetic engineering, giving them the power to change animals with specific goals, not random copying errors.

Today, man can fully know and comprehend the vast distances of time that separate them from the dawn of time. They can fully appreciate the weight o the near eternity of development that gave their little world life…

And they have the gall to call ten years 'a long time'.

* * *

Planet Lemaxa hung in the starry void of space, a planet whose outer crust was one continuous, unbroken field of flat ice. The thin atmosphere above the ice gave the planet a little halo of light as the bluish sun slowly dawned over the western horizon. There was nothing living on Lemaxa. Nothing at all.

Of course, I didn't say anything about life _in _Lemaxa, now did I?

Suddenly, a patch of the forty-foot thick icy shell grew bright. Slowly, the ice melted, even in the twenty-below temperature, and a shiny bullet of metal shot out of the ice like a cork from a bottle. This was Lemaxa's first faster-than-light spacecraft, the first of its kind in the history of the universe.

The Lemaxans, frankly, are the last species you'd expect to be the first to break the great universal speed limit. They are little more than green slugs, possessing no natural defenses except for some nasty electric shocks. They lived in the warm ocean beneath Lemaxa's outer layer, warmed by the swirling currents of magma in the core. The Lemaxans had spent most of their history on the hot ocean floor, where no light from the Lemaxan sun ever penetrated. No light from the sun ever penetrated the icy shell to begin with, but the sea was lit by the thousands of luminescent bacteria that gave everything in the planet a purplish tinge.

The Lemaxans were not first because they developed faster than other races (it actually took them twice as long), but because they had achieved intelligence three time earlier.

The Lemaxans had a long, noble past under the ice: Millennia of advancement, war, trade, passion, and vicious corporate competition had given the Lemaxans incredible technologies and a surprising knowledge of the workings of the universe.

The small metal pod, filled with water, carried the bold slugs beyond Lemaxa's gravity field, to a series of metal stations waiting for them. The captain of the ship contacted the other Lemaxans, to make sure everything was ready for them. The metal station would focus beams of energy at one focal point, warping the fabric of space and time through the sheer amount of energy present. They would twist space until they finally tore through halfway into another dimension. The strange region they would enter, not a universe, but rather, a divider between ones, would allow them to finally achieve superluminal travel.

The target destination of this bold venture? Lemaxa's farthest moon, 252000 miles away. Not very far, actually, but far enough for the observers at the moon base to figure out their speed.

The five laser stations fired, and the special focusing piece of metal they were firing at collected the tremendous energy. The Lemaxan captain checked the gravity readings on the control panel: They were nearing critical mass…

Suddenly, the immense energy of the beams was too much for the little piece of focusing metal, and the atoms that made it up collapsed into a singularity. It was unstable, yes, but it was what they needed: A black hole.

The Lemaxan craft shot forward towards the portal, and the crew felt their little green bodies shiver with delight. Then, abruptly, they entered the wormhole and the ship was filled with blazing blue light that stunned the crew for the instant they were in the tunnel. And then, so quick you could have missed it if you blinked, they were hovering in space a few miles from the moon base.

The Lemaxan captain shakily extended a feeler, and hit a button to contact the observers down below.

"H-How fast were we?" He said shakily.

The answer came back, excited, "250000 miles in 0.5 seconds! You did it! Three times faster than the speed of light!"

Massive cheering broke out on the ship, back on Lemaxa, and on the stations that had created the wormhole. Feelers were shook, Lemaxan champagne was poured into the rooms for people to absorb, and the scientists hailed this as the beginning of an era.

How, you may ask, does this have to do with Invader Zim? Well, it doesn't really. In fact, the purpose of the preceding paragraphs was to explain the old, decrepit Lemaxan pod that was still floating through space over Irk when Tallest Vio was holding a secret meeting in his space station, two million years later. The pod was a leftover from Lemaxa's prime, when it had been sending out pods to study all forms of sentient life as they could. The pod had marked the progression of the Irkens, and then shut down, its purpose fulfilled.

The pod was unable to see the meeting that would cause much, much grief in the universe, and even if it had, the Lemaxans would be rendered impotent by the distance to stop it. The meeting was held in a simple, long room on the station, filled with eighteen Irkens. The Tallest, and the Control Brains. You may already know what a Tallest looks like: Thin, imposing, tall (duh), and probably levitating. You may not know what a Control Brain looks like, though: They are essentially Irkens, but in a metal suit that takes away everything familiar about them.

The nearly useless arms and torso are simply kept in the thumb-shaped metal tube that really only serves as a place to connect the four long metallic tentacles that a Control Brain uses to manipulate its physical surroundings. The head of a Control Brain suit is monstrously elongated backwards: It thickens to four feet wide behind the Control Brain 'face' (a metal plate that contains the breathing and feeding equipment that automatically sustain the Control Brain, and two large green viewports), and extends back ten feet, tapering to a point. The massive segmented head also tapers height wise form the base, but the head is still huge. This head contains the massive computers and communications equipment that the Control Brain is always connected to. The Control Brains were the ultimate cyborgs, moving their limbs with mental links, not even using their eyes to see (they simply had images sent through wires into their heads). Their bodies were useless at this point: It was merely a support system for the brain that ran everything.

Tallest Vio entered the meeting room, and the Brains gave him the only kind of salute they could still do: Their faceplates slid to the sides, revealing the pale face of the Irken inside. They opened, and then squinted their eyes, which had gone dark from under usage.

Vio gave them a quick little salute, and they thankfully slid their faceplates back into position. The Tallest took a seat, indicating that the others should do so.

"My friends," he said, acting as if they were equals, "We have the power to do something previous Tallests and nobles, such as yourself, have only dreamed of: Total control over the Irken Empire."

Div, the most important of the Control Brains, asked in confusion, "Don't we already control the Empire, my Tallest?"

Vio nodded, "To a degree. I give the orders, you manage the InterPAK and stuff, but that is not enough. Suppose too many politicians visit Vort and come back thinking that the Tall aren't any better than the short, and try to set up a democracy or something? Besides, I think we want more than nominal loyalty… We want _power_. We want complete control, without a chance of rebellion, or any opposition."

He paused dramatically, watching the Control Brains looking amongst themselves and murmuring approvingly. All but one.

"My Tallest," Mev, perhaps the only uncorrupted of the Control Brains said, "I would not want to be a tyrant. Besides, even if we are all fine with controlling our citizens completely, there is simply no way to do it. What you are suggesting would require having our citizens, from the day they are born to the day they die, hearing nothing, thinking nothing, or even considering anything that would go against the Empire."

Vio frowned. "Are you suggesting my plan is unethical, Mev? Are _you_ ordering _me_ to stop?"

The crowd of Control Brains hushed immediately, and Mev sunk further into his chair. "No, my Tallest."

Vio leaned back in his chair, and once again addressed the crowd. "Nevertheless, Mev brings up some important technical problems. How are we to control our citizens? Well, every Irken in the universe wears a PAK, do they not? And a PAK can be easily set up to control an Irken mind through the spinal connection… What do you say to that, Mev?"

Mev looked around the room, gave a small electronic sigh of defeat, then answered the Tallest. "It… might work. Of course, you'd need some sort of system to keep the PAKs feeding them propaganda, and anyone who isn't wearing a mind control PAK will realize what's going on, and take their's off. After that, all any rebellion would have to do would be to run around yanking people's PAKs off."

Vio smiled. "Already done: With the Control Brains' technical skills, I can easily build a transmitting network to control PAKs. I've also guaranteed that we'll be able to control every Irken from the day they're born to the day they die. And they most certainly won't take their PAKs off."

This was just ridiculous. Nobody could possibly do that. Mev straightened up in his chair, but Vio held out a hand.

"Don't be so quick to criticize me, Mev. You don't know what the plan is."

The Control Brains, minus Mev, leaned forward in interest to hear their leader's brilliant idea.

The tallest smiled, and leaned back, enjoying the attention. "Well," he said slowly, "You know how every Irken nowadays is being born in birthing tubes?"

They all nodded eagerly.

"We'll just take control over those facilities. The instant a smeet is born, we can tell it what to do, what to think, what to believe…. We raise the smeets in government centers, and they'll never hear anything we don't want them to hear from their parents."

The Control Brains all agreed this was a wonderful idea. Mev just shook his head.

"PR disaster," he said, "Do you really want to kidnap every smeet in the Empire? People will riot."

"The genius is," Vio said smugly, "That everyone will be getting brainwashed by then. It won't be perfect with the older generation, but at least it'll keep us in power until the next wave of fully controlled soldiers grows up. Besides, there won't be any parents when we're ready to take over: From now on, the computers will randomly combine male and female Irken DNA, make a smeet, and send it off to training. No more smeets will be made except for those needed by the Empire."

"Even then, how will you control people? They'll get suspicious, and end up ripping the mind controlling PAKs off people."

"Everyone will be wearing a PAK. They'll have to. I've edited the Irken genome. Not only is it impossible for Irkens to have smeets naturally, their Squooch glands have been damaged. As you probably know, the Squooch gland makes a certain chemical: Na-3Cl-5. We need this chemical. It's in practically every compound in our bodies. If an Irken is cut off from it, they will be dead in a matter of minutes. I've already made sure that all PAKs can compensate for this, but it's imperfect: The PAKs will have to think for the Irkens half of the time. But anyways, we'll be completely in charge."

The control Brains sat there in silent shock.

"Don't believe me?" The Tallest said. He snapped his fingers.

Immediately a guard stepped into the room, and saluted the figures sitting there as the door shut. "Yes, my Tallest? Is there anything you need?"

"Yes," Vio said, "Please get up on the table so the Control Brains can see what a good soldier you are."

The guard arched an eyebrow, but climbed up on the table.

Vio smiled, "Good. Now take your PAK off."

The guard obediently pulled the pod off, though it took some effort, and handed it over to the Tallest.

"Now what?" He asked.

"Oh nothing. Just stand there."

The guard turned back around, and for a few moments, all was well.

Then the guard frowned, and put a hand over his Squeedlyspooch.

"Something wrong?" Vio said with mock concern.

"Ow… I just feel weird, my Tallest. I'd like to put my Pak back on."

"Oh, no, no, no! Its imperative you don't put your PAK on."

The soldier stood back up for a minute, but they could all see the pain on his face.

Mev, who saw where this was going, said, "Alright, my Tallest, I believe you… Please give the guard his PAK back."

Vio didn't seem to care. "Unethical, huh? I've got to show you I don't care about ethics." He said darkly.

"M-my Tallest, I don't under-" The guard began to say, but his body suddenly had a spasm mid sentence.

He fell to the table, clutching at his stomach, the lights in his eyes dimming. Vio nonchalantly looked up at the clock and said, "Two minutes…"

The Control Brains watched in horror as the little Irken twitched involuntarily. His eyes had dimmed to maroon, and his antennae lay limply on the table. With a final jerking heave the Irken curled up into a ball, and died.

The room was silent for a few long minutes. The Tallest had just killed a loyal citizen of the Irken Empire to make a point.

"I think we understand each other…" Vio said.

Perhaps it is fitting that 2,260 years later, a young smeet would chose the name Zim in honor of that innocent guard who gave everything up in service of the Empire.

But most people think its ironic.

* * *

**Fanatic Drone N presents:**

**Rise of the Smallest**


	2. The Smallers and Tallers

Sixty million light-years from the Earth, beyond the farthest reach of the Irken Empire, lies a galaxy known to humanity only as 'NGC 1300'. To its inhabitants, it is the proud and great Natra galaxy, presided over by the Natrian Empire…

Which really isn't an 'Empire', per se: Empire just sounds cooler than 'Natrian Republic of Unified States', and if you were an alien warlord bent on universal domination, 'Empire' sounds a bit more threatening.

The Natrian Empire was, at its uppermost level, run by five beings; the Natrian High Council, of which Scly was a member. Their jobs ranged from normal military defense, to genetically engineering new plants and animals to make barren worlds habitable. Scly fell into the latter category.

It really was the job he loved: As far as he was concerned, their was no better way to contribute to the galaxy than what he was doing. Most people found it weird that he could recite their entire genome (even though he'd have to stop after the first few hundred genes), or tamper with the very fabric of life, but the twist of the chromosome was the most beautiful thing in the worlds to Scly. He studied the way proteins warped, amino acids linked, and every single little function in a cell was repeated a trillion fold every day.

To him, there was nothing more intresting than these little functions of life, the little miracles smaller than the eye could see…

Most people agreed he needed to get a life.

Scly had also designed the ship he was walking through this very moment, all four hundred miles of it. The _Victory _(Mark VI) had been floating around with all the other conceptual projects in Scly's head until about half a year ago, when they had discovered the Irkens and learned they needed a ship to rival the _Massive_.

Scly was an Introi. That meant that he had a twelve foot long serpentine body, with a dinosaur head on one end and a long bone spike on the other. He had two large legs, covered in the emerald scales that graced the rest of his body, but built like a bird's; Two 'normal' arms tipped with four-fingered, clawed hands; Two arms tipped not with hands, but with enormous mantis-like bone blades, and vision that could extend into the farthest reaches of the ultraviolet spectrum. The Introi were the perfect predators, and yet they were a noble, good species, whose primary goal in life was a quiet life at home with the family. We might view this as lack of ambition, but the Introi take it very seriously, considering it the main achievement of their lives.

However, this does not mean they were unwilling to focus on other races: In fact, that was the reason they were now somewhere between the planets Earth and Blorch. The Irkens represented the greatest challenge they ever faced: A race whose leadership was pure evil, whose people were as much slaves as subjugated species, and whose ego left no room for negotiation.

So it was a little strange to find a totally helpless Irken floating in space.

The news that a Irken had been found adrift in a battle-scarred and somewhat greasy modified Spittle Runner reached the bridge quickly, where Scly was enjoying his breakfast.

"Sir!" An out-of-breath Aurus said as he ran up to the High Council member.

Scly distractedly returned the large green bird's salute, and proceeded to not pay attention while the medical officer explained the situation. He had gotten completely absorbed with staring at the logo on the drink dispenser when the officer suddenly said 'Irken'.

Scly blinked, then turned to face the officer. "Come again?"

"There's a Irken in the medbay, sir… It appears to be unconscious."

Scly sighed, set down his cup, and walked towards the elevator.

Tak came to on an operating table on the _Victory_. She groaned as she sat up, fighting a horrible headache and tiredness. She tried to grasp the sensations her awakening mind was being battered by… Words. She could hear words.

Blearily she cracked open an eye. Blurry shapes in the distance were talking. She only caught part of what they were saying: "… Came out okay… no transmissions…it's waking up…"

She groaned again, and massaged her temples. What was wrong with her?

Tak told her PAK to run a self diagnostic, and it immediately responded: It was only operating at 20 percent power. She slowly told it to get up to normal levels, and immediately snapped fully awake.

She leapt out of bed, asking the PAK if they'd cut her open. The PAK responded that they had left _her_ alone, but had opened up and taken things out of her PAK.

_What did they take?_ She asked it.

_Classified._

Tak was really worried now: They had taken out something too important for her PAK to tell her about.

She quickly ran to the side of the room, and almost fell over. She had gotten so used to her heavy PAK that she always angled herself forward to compensate, but now her PAK weighed less. Tak hid behind the table as the doors slid open, then slid a thin wire around the corner of the table. Her normal vision blacked out, and was replaced by the image coming from the micro camera.

With a start, she saw Scly standing in the entryway.

"Hello, Tak… Nice camera."

She quickly pulled back the fiber-optic cable, and peered over the side of the table. Scly was standing there, looking across the room with a little curiosity, and… excitement? Tak decided to find out.

"Well," Tak said, lifting herself up on PAK legs to increase her height, "I haven't seen you in a while."

"Still angry about the whole 'abduction' thing? It was just a few psychological tests." Scly said nonchalantly.

"And a robot."

Scly smiled. "Yes, the robot was a bit excessive… I could've just knocked you out."

They regarded each other in the strange way of enemies when off-duty. They weren't going to rip each other's throats out, but it was still awkward.

"So," Scly said, curiously, "What do you think of Tallest Red?"

Tak narrowed her eyes. "What are you talking about? He's the _Tallest_. I give him the respect he deserves."

"Uh-huh… What about the time he pummeled every Invader who didn't make a puppet show for Probing Day?"

Tak winced. "Yeah, that was a little over the top- Wait a second!"

Tak felt a seething wave of anger overcome her: They had found a way to make her think disloyally about the Tallest, something that in every loyal Irken's mind was worse than death. She was a _liability_ to the Empire if she couldn't know and believe her leaders were infallible.

"What did you do to my PAK?" She said through clenched teeth.

"Well, it's more like we _stopped _something from happening, you see-" Scly began, stopping when he realized this might not go over well. "Eh… Just follow me."

Scly walked out of the room. Tak hesitated a moment, but the need to find out what they did overcame her fear of the aliens who had said they would violently oppose the Empire. Scly led her to a little table, empty except for a strange, dome shaped device. Tak felt a chill as she realized that it was the exact shape as the empty space in her PAK.

"Tak, why don't you scan this?" Scly suggested.

Tak did, and got the same 'Classified' message.

"It says it won't tell me." She said.

"Ask it whose authority it is withholding the information for."

Tak frowned, but tried again:

_PAK, what is the object on the table?_

_Classified._

_Whose authority makes it classified?_

_Searching… Error: Security programs have no verification. Verification most likely came from object removed from PAK. Answering previous query: Object is standard-class transmitter and processor designed to control the thoughts and emotions of the owners PAK._

Immediately the color drained from Tak's face. Scly noticed, and said, "You were being used, Tak… This thing was keeping you a happy, loyal citizen of the Empire."

Tak registered no emotion, but sank to the floor. For every horrible second after the horrible discovery, Tak could name another ten instances when the Empire, the center of her life, had proved itself to be corrupt and unstable:

Skoodge, easily the most capable Invader of her time, being sent to an unimportant and violent planet on the now-unimportant basis of height; Tallest Purple ordering twenty soldiers to try and steal donut from a Sloooroxoplian Swollen-head monster; the three-eyed goat incident (which had been bad enough before she was free from the Control Brains'… control).

She curled up slowly, hugging her knees. The most stable, unchanging, pride-inspiring thing in her life had just been proven to be nothing more than a stack of cards, held up by what was essentially slave labor. She didn't belong to it anymore; She didn't belong to _anything_. Every Irken in the universe was now different from her. Nothing about her held any value whatsoever to anyone anymore. She was _worthless_.

"You couldn't just kill me… You had to rub it in my face… I don't matter…" She said, more to herself than to Scly.

"Hey," Scly said, trying to be comforting (not easy to do when you're a four-tongued alien monster), and crouched down next to her, "You're the first free Irken in two thousand years… That's gotta be something."

Tak did not respond, but raised her head a fraction.

"Besides," He went on, "You have a duty to you're people. You're going to help reform the Empire: There are billions of other Irkens out there being brainwashed. You swore you'd help the Empire, and that's what you're going to do."

This helped a lot. A thin, weak smile spread across her face. "…Sorry," She said, "I kind of lost control of myself there."

Scly smiled. "It's fine. Now, Tak, I have a job for you…"

* * *

It is now the time for us to look into the lives of two other Irkens, far off on planet Irk. They were both Tallers: One of the hundred-or-so Irkens who were just shorter than the Almighty Tallest.

The two Irkens who will play a role in our story were the Tallers Vem and Lir, the third and fourth Tallests, respectively. As they sat near the top rung of the Irken hierarchy, a place equal to the Control Brains', one can imagine the power they wield, and how seriously they treat it.

Lir was doing a loop-de-loop in the central dome of the Imperial Palace.

Over the hum of his standard-issue hover belt, he could hear the crowd of tourists below him clapping and cheering. Lir put on these shows daily, on his way to 'work'. He never actually did anything, but instead cut off sizable chunks of his extremely high salary to those poorer Irkens willing to do his work. He had earned a reputation for laziness and generosity, and it was well known the Taller of Financial Records had not touched a calculator in well over a year. He was supposed to be in charge of checking the financial records of the Empire deemed too unimportant for the Control Brains, swamped as they were with the more important logistics.

Lir swooped down for a graceful landing, and took a bow, his eyes twinkling with the lights of a born entertainer.

"Lir!" Came the voice of a born obsessive-compulsive.

Lir sighed as the crowd quickly cleared away. Without turning around he knew who was there.

"Hello, Vem…" Lir said, adopting a morose tone. The other Tallers gathered from their places around the room, and watched the daily struggle between ambition and apathy. The two faction were to these upper-crust Irkens what religion once was. Lir always had a group of about twenty hard-core 'apatheists', and Vem always had a crowd of twenty 'ambitionites'. It was like a game, this competition for the sixty Tallers who would go either way, but few realized how seriously Vem and Lir took it. It was a game, of course, but Vem and Lir were the third and fourth Tallest, respectively. A little friendly competition never hurt anyone.

"Lir, we have a job to do here," She said angrily. Lir didn't know why she cared so much, but she did. "That job does not include entertaining tourists."

Lir turned around, and fixed Vem with his most unnerving stare. Most people would get others to do what they wanted by appearing focused, while Lir, instead of appearing intimidating, gave them the opposite.

Vem flinched, and hovered backwards a bit under Lir's apathetic, emotionless stare. Lir stared her down with his completely unfocused green eyes, and in a tone that plainly proclaimed itself unable to be bothered, said, "Vem, I don't care. The Tallests don't care. The Control Brains don't care. This 'job' is just a way to make the upper levels of the Empire look busy." Several apatheists cheered (in a roundabout way), and large numbers of Tallers drifted towards Lir's end of the room.

Ambition won the day, however. Vem glared back at him with her own pinkish eyes, and quietly said, "Lir, unlike you, I want to _help_ the empire. If the Tallests say they this will do that, I'm going to do this. Its my duty, whether or not they take it seriously."

Vem's supporters cheered, and a group of idealistic converts followed their prophet of profit out of the room to work hard. Lir shrugged. Tomorrow would bring another debate, and he could probably win with most of the Irkens sick of effort tomorrow. Lir floated over to the holographic chalkboard, and added a point for Vem.

What do two Tallers who have mock competitions to pass time have to do with the as-yet-unmentioned Invader Zim, you may ask. Lir and Vem's connection to the future Smallest came in the form of a Tallest's advisor who ran up to Lir, grabbed the unresisting taller by the arm, and dragged him over to Vem before she left the room.

"So, what is it?" Lir asked the shorter, panting Irken, as Vem handed him a soda.

The advisor took a quick sip, then turned to Vem, who seemed considerably more interested than Lir. "The Tallests have requested that you two come aboard the _Massive_ immediately."

* * *

Well, now we have some more OCs (I don't think I'll be introducing too many more after this chapter).

If you don't review, we'll come in the night and fill your house with **TATER-TOTS**!


	3. Life on the Massive

A few days later, Lir and Vem were on a shuttle docking with the _Massive_. Vem was excited out of her mind: Here she was, the third (or second, depending on how you look at it) tallest Irken in the Empire, traveling to work with the Tallests on the _Massive_ itself! She had packed every conceivable thing she used at work into a heap of luggage, and was nervously pacing (er… floating) around the spacious Taller shuttle, thinking excitedly about her new assignment.

Lir was slouched in his chair, sleeping (a rare and strange pastime he seemed to love), surrounded by the cans of soda he had drunk in the first fifteen minutes of the flight. Vem looked at him with mild disgust, before floating over and shaking him awake.

"Lir, get up."

Snore.

"We're almost there."

Snore.

"The Tallests are gonna be angry."

Lir shifted in his sleep

"Someone's stealing your soda-"

Lir jerked awake, snapping his arms into an obscure, yet funny, martial arts pose. He scanned the room quickly before fully waking up, and blearily glaring a Vem.

"That's not funny…" He mumbled, grabbing a half-full can from the pile.

There was a sudden thump from outside the ship, and the door opened, letting in the faint chemical smells of the _Massive'_s many armories, fuel silos and food courts.

Vem hovered out onto the gangplank, staring with wonder at the sheer size of it all. Lir floated by, sipping his soda absentmindedly and watching the pilots scurrying on the hangar floor far below. The cavernous white-walled hanger displayed the typical features of Irken engineering: Patchwork walls of recycled metal, snaking tubes connecting various pieces of equipment, vending machines that never worked, and strange humming noises coming from all around in an omnipresent crescendo. Hundreds of ships were whizzing around them, messages being beamed at speeds that made light look like a drunken turtle. They were truly in the second capital of the Irken Empire.

Lir finished his soda, and tossed it over the railing, laughing as it impacted on the floor some two hundred feet below him.

The bellhop-drones led them through an automated door, into the darker, red colored corridors of the actual ship. They were escorted to a line of teleporters, when Lir suddenly flinched.

"No, no, no, no, no: I am not getting in those things. Noooo. I'll walk." He said, turning towards the bridge and starting down in its direction.

"Lir, are you afraid of the teleporters?" Vem teased, sticking her head out of the tube.

"Yes." He said matter-of-factly, "And you're not getting me in there."

"Fine… I'll just beat you to the bridge… By a few hours."

Lir stiffened and turned around, making the bellhop-drones nudge each other. They knew what was coming up: Lir and Vem's competitions were well known, even for soldiers aboard the _Massive_.

"Well," Lir said, "We'll just have to see about that. I'll be waiting at the bridge when you get there."

Vem just shook her head. Lir was being ridiculous: The _Massive_ was over four hundred miles long.

Still shaking her head, and musing over Lir's apparent teleportation fear, she hit the bridge button on the control panel. The pod was suddenly filled with electric pinkish light, and she stepped out into the teleporter room behind the actual bridge. She shook her head again, and hovered towards the exit. Lir wouldn't be around for a few hours, and-

"Hi there."

Vem spun around in shock. Lir was nonchalantly leaning against the wall, examining his two elongated fingers (two fingers grew out during the final growth spurt that pushed an Irken into the realm of the truly tall, while the third simply disappeared).

"Let's go." he said, moving past Vem towards the bridge.

"B-but, how did… How did you do that?"

"Vem," Lir said with a smile, "A magician never reveals his secrets. Besides, I want an advantage the next time you try to race me."

Vem tried to get more out of him, but was suddenly interrupted by Tallest Purple.

"Lir!" He yelled, before flying across the room and high-fiveing the suddenly happier Taller. "Long time no see, Lir. Where've you been?"

"Oh you know… Irk, Conventia, behind this really bad smelling dumpster on Vort, but that's another story. Look at you! Good ol' Pur, an Almighty Tallest!"

Vem blinked in confusion. Lir was _friends_ with the Almighty Tallest?

Red floated over to Vem. "Hey, Vem!" He said, with forced enthusiasm, "Great to see you!"

"Um… Thank you, my tallest…?" She said in confusion. She didn't know Tallest Red at all.

Red shook her hand, talking about some random subject, but he left a little square piece of paper in it. Vem tried not to look too noticeable (not too difficult: Lir and Purple were ranting on about how Vort dogs were supposed to taste) as she read the note:_ Purple invited Lir on the _Massive_, and I said if he got to bring a friend on board, then I did. He took my bluff, so I had to invite you or I'd look stupid. Pretend you've known me for a long time._

Vem quickly folded up the note, irritated that Red had only brought her to not look like an idiot.

"So, how do you two know each other?" Lir asked.

Vem shot Red a _'Well?'_ look. Red shot her a '_I don't know!'_ look. Vem turned back to Lir, who was giving her a '_I know what's going on, perfectly well.' _look.

"We… met at the academy!" Vem lied.

"Oh really? The day he copied off your test?"

Vem spun around to face Red. She had studied nonstop for three days for that test, and he just read off her sheet?

"You copied off my test!?" She asked angrily. Red flinched: He knew Vem was a bit obsessive about work, but she didn't have to get so worked up.

Lir laughed. "Let me guess… Red, you didn't want to look like a loser by not having any friends to invite onto the ship, so you just chose the Irken just barely shorter than you, but didn't know anything about her."

Red nodded, dumbfounded about how such a famously lazy Irken was so perceptive.

Lir smiled. "My Tallest, if you were not the Tallest, I would not recommend a career in military strategy. You _could_ be an impressive diplomat though: You're great at lying. Vem on the other hand…" He said, leaving the insult unsaid.

Red opened his mouth, then closed it, not knowing whether to thank Lir for the compliment or have him thrown out the airlock for dissing his long-term planning.

Lir didn't really give him a chance to do anything anyways. He turned to Purple, and asked him excitedly "Is it true that you have your own Shloogorgh's in the food court?"

Purple grinned, "You thinking what I'm thinking?"

Red sighed under his breath. "_Oh, boy…_"

Purple and Lir both yelled in unison: "VORT-DOG EARTING CONTEST!" They then ran out of the room, followed by a crowd of Irkens who also participated in the Tallests eating contests (along with those who just wanted to get out of work).

This left Red and Vem alone on the bridge with no one to talk to but each other.

"Well… This is awkward." Red said, restating the obvious.

"Yeah. Can I go back to Irk now? I want to do my job, and I think you lost this round to Purple."

Red shrugged. "It's not a big deal. He's my best friend. Besides, don't you want to work on the _Massive_?"

"I want to _work_. Awkwardness doesn't help the Empire."

Red smiled. "Nice to see someone who cares that much. Anyways, you can still do your job here. What was it you do again?"

"I manage demographics information on newly conquered and absorbed peoples."

"You can do that on the_ Massive_: You'll be closer to everything. What does Lir do?"

"Pay his secretary five times as much to do all his work."

"Oh. Well, Purple wants him on the _Massive_, and he's probably got some automated program to pay them."

"Yeah… I'm gonna go watch those two gorge themselves. Maybe Lir'll blow up.

And with that, she left the room.

One of the navigators gave Red the thumbs-up. "Smooth."

* * *

A few weeks later, life on the _Massive_ had gotten more normal: Red and Lir regarded each other as actual friends, not 'Some friend of Purple's.".

While Vem found that working on the _Massive_ actually did help her in work, Lir and the Tallests whiled away the days staring at the stars, and having long philosophical discussions. The true depth of their debates is too much to describe here, so you will have to make do with a short snippet from just before the rescue mission on planet Meekrob:

"Lasers are _so_ much better than smoke machines, and you know it!" Red snapped accusatively, pointing one finger at Purple.

Lir Red and purple were all sitting at a table in the break room behind the bridge, having an 'important discussion' on which kinds of special effects were the best. Vem was hovering in the corner, entertaining herself with how long these people could debate pointless topics.

"Nuh-uh! Smoke machines are awesome! Lasers are just… tacky." Purple said leaning forward.

"You wouldn't know tacky if it-" Red began.

"Look, how 'bout _I _settle this?" Lir cut in.

Red looked across the table at Purple. Purple nodded, then shook Red's hand. "Deal."

"Okay… Red, you're wrong," Lir said.

"YES! In your face!" Purple said, jumping up in triumph.

"And, Purple, you're wrong." Lir said, stopping Purple mid victory lap.

"Well, if it's not smoke machines, and it's not lasers, what is it?" Red asked as Purple settled sadly into his chair.

"Lasers are cool," Lir admitted, "But they don't really seem _real_ to the audience. It's basically fancy light. Smoke machines are less impressive, but they're closer to the audience: They seem more tangible."

"So, what is it?" Purple asked.

"One word: _Pyrotechnics_."

"…Pyrotechnics…" Red and Purple repeated, considering the possibility.

Vem sighed. "You do realize that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard you guys argue about?"

The three exchanged looks, then gave her a unanimous "Yeah."

Vem rolled her eyes, then floated out of the break room. The three quickly looked for another subject to debate.

Noticing a familiar stain on the floor, Purple launched a discussion on Table-headed service drone Bob.

"You think we should have paid him?" He asked Red.

"No way! The guy was totally disrespectful."

"Well, yeah, but imagine if you were a Table-headed service drone, and you got a billion monies."

"So? We're the Tallests."

"Wait a minute, wait a minute… Are we talking about _the_ Table-headed service drone Bob?" Lir asked with interest.

"Uh, yeah. Why?"

"A Table-headed service drone going by the name of 'Bob' came to my department with an official betting ticket worth 1.2 billion monies. It was official, from _you_ actually, so I gave it to him." Lir said.

Red's eyes widened. "So THAT'S where all the money went! Where did Bob go?" He asked hurriedly. He wanted his money back…

"Um… He said he was going to Sleazybackalleyia, to, and I quote, 'Get away from those cheapskate Tallests and the law! VIVA SLEAZYBACKALLEYIA!'" Lir repeated nervously (doing a fine impression of Bob's voice at the end though).

"So you let him go!?" Red demanded angrily.

"The guy was certifiably insane." Lir countered with a straight face.

Purple winced. "That's not good…"

Vem stuck her head into the room. "Hey, we're at planet Meekrob now, so… Give a speech or something."

Red and Purple straightened up immediately, and brushed the crumbs off of their armor. They hovered quickly out of the room, past Vem, followed by Lir.

"Brave Irken soldiers!" Red called out vial a one-way 'speech-giving' interface to the assembled Armada, "We shall conquer the universe one day, but we have setbacks along the way. Today, we shall attack the planet Meekrob, where they are keeping one of our own, Invader Tenn, a prisoner!"

Purple floated up, "We want to make it clear that this is Z_im's_ fault. Invader Tenn was supposed to get a Megadoomer assault-mech, but she instead got a load of faulty SIRs meant for Zim. You can guess who got the Megadoomer…"

"The Meekrob," Red continued, "Have an energy shield surrounding their planet. Nothing larger than a Spittle Runner will be able to get through, so we ask that you volunteer to be Invaders for a day, and infiltrate the Meekrobian prison where they are keeping Tenn. Once you free her, she should be able to get herself out. So any volun-"

"ME! ME! ZIM SHALL COMPLETE THEIS MISSION USING THE AWESOME MIGHT OF ZIM! WHO IS ME! _I AM ZIM_!" A voice yelled over the speakers.

Red massaged his temples. "Oh no…"

Zim's face suddenly appeared on the screen. He was obviously in his outdated Voot cruiser, as Skoodge had almost no room to run around screaming in the background (GIR was sucking his head, trying to get some flavor from his antennae). Zim looked as confident as ever, grinning, his arm still up in a salute.

Lir floated by with a bag of chips. He smiled when he looked at the screen: "Heyyyy, Zim!"

Zim's salute hand started waving immediately. "Hey, it's you Lir! How's it been?"

"Pretty good, IZ."

Vem's mouth fell open. IZ? Lir was _friends _with _Zim_!?

"Wow, you grew a lot… You're a Taller, aren't you?"

"Third, or fourth, depending on how you look at it. Vem and the Tallests are taller than me, but I have the third biggest height in the Empire."

"That's great! The amazing ZIM has been busy trying to conquer planet Earth!"

"I've never heard of 'Earth'."

"That's because those who have heard of it dare not speak its name."

"But you just spoke it…"

"Any who," Zim said, turning towards the Tallests, "Zim is ready for his mission to planet Meekrob. Me and Invader Skoodge shall go down to the planet, and rescue Invader Tenn. I am fully equipped and ready to go, my Tallests, I am simply awaiting you're permission."

Red opened his mouth to tell Zim to go away, but Purple interrupted: "That's great Zim. You just go down there and get Tenn for us."

Zim grinned. "Thank you, my Tallests! I shall not fail you-"

GIR suddenly appeared onscreen, falling down in front of Zim.

Her grabbed the camera, and shook it, yelling: "HI DADDY! HI MOMMY!"

Lir sipped on his new soda he had somehow gotten in the last five seconds. "… 'Mommy'?"

Purple sighed, "It's a long, dull story…"

Red glared at his co-Tallest. "What did you do that for? We have thirty other Invaders we could have sent down there, all of whom have a better chance of pulling off the mission. Zim's just gonna get himself killed."

"Right, and then we can send someone else down, and we'll be rid of Zim forever. Besides, if he _does _pull it off, we don't have to risk anybody important."

Red blinked. "…That is the smartest thing you have ever said."

Lir laughed through a mouthful of donuts (where does he keep getting these?). "I wouldn't bank on Zim getting killed…"

* * *

Finally, we see Zim! It took three chapters, but he showed up.

If you do not review, you shall wake up tomorrow under thirty-five feet of guacamole…


	4. Mission Unlikely

Planet Meekrob was an average planet, unusual only in its super-abundance of silicon. The entire subterranean world was a huge computer chip, when you got down to it: Miles and miles of superconducting metal, energized by fierce magnetic storms that raged across the surface. The Meekrob themselves were little more than glorified computer programs, pulses of energy that achieved rational thought. They dwelled in the massive circuits of the subterranean world, and only recently had Meekrob decided to take advantage of material objects to free themselves from their home planet.

The Meekrob had first emerged in the more ordinary rocky layer several hundred years ago, and had set up little bases to collect material. In time, the Meekrob had conquered this upper world and the animal 'meat-bags' they looked down upon. They built starships and shields to protect themselves from the ruinous magnetic storms, and had extended their influence across the neighboring star systems. They colonized quickly, needing neither air nor water, until the Irken Empire decided to snuff out the Meekrob before they became a threat.

Needless to say, it wasn't going well.

Zim held on to the controls of his Voot as it was buffeted by the intense electromagnetic storms that made flight nearly impossible. Zim was flying his ship in the narrow gap between the Meekrobs' shield and a patch of ionized gas in the upper atmosphere, trying to avoid bumping into one and exploding.

The Voot had been vibrating for the past few minutes, but now it began to shudder violently. Zim strained against the unresponsive controls as the ship began to spin.

"Skoodge!" He yelled.

There was a crash from behind him as Skoodge ran up, one arm up to the elbow in GIR's mouth.

He quickly saluted Zim, and nearly knocked himself out (GIR was a lot heavier than he looked). "Yeah, Zim?" Skoodge asked, wearily trying to pull his arm out of GIR's filthy mouth.

"The Voot's starboard engine has been damaged, Skoodge, and I need you to repair it."

Skoodge turned fearfully to look at the currents of energized gas that swirled a few feet from the window. The aurora borealis on earth had been much less threatening… and much farther away.

"Uh, Zim… I was planning to be alive tomorrow, so-" Skoodge began.

"Look, Skoodge, GIR is helpless in this situation. Advanced as he is, the Tallests did not give me a robot equipped to handle heavy machinery, and _someone_ has to go out there and fix the engine!" Zim said indignantly, offended by the very idea Skoodge would complain to the incredible ZIM!

"So why can't _you _go out? I trained for four years in advanced piloting, and you were a scientist on Vort. Besides, I don't know how this ship works!"

Zim sighed. "Poor Skoodge… so naïve. Don't you realize it's _dangerous_ out there? I think we both know who is more vital to the mission."

This did not have the desired motivational effect. "You're sending me out there because you think I'm gonna _die_!?" Skoodge yelled, appalled.

Zim shook his head, smiling reassuringly, "Don't worry, Skoodge: I will equip you with the most advanced safety equipment and repair tools ever. Trust me!"

Thirty seconds later, Skoodge was clinging to the side of the Voot desperately as the winds buffeted him. The 'advanced equipment' had turned out to be two toilet plungers (used) to anchor him to the hull, and a roll of duct tape.

As he bit off a piece of the tape, Skoodge noticed three Meekrobian fighters shooting up to meet them. He quickly stuck two pieces of metal together, slammed the maintenance hatch, and scurried to the entry hatch at the bottom of the Voot. Skoodge stuck his head into the small ship's cramped interior, and yelled at Zim: "Meekrob fighters up ahead! Take evasive action!"

Zim frowned. "Never! The amazing ZIM never runs from battle!"

"Zim, evasive action is just avoiding being hit! It's not cowardly, it's smart!"

"Same difference!" Zim snapped, pushing the engines to their maximum, and pointing straight at the lead Meekrobian ship.

The Meekrob ships were basically lead bullets with engines: A protective shell to le the Meekrob survive the intense radiation, with the other devices and capabilities added as an afterthought. Inside the sparse, small cabin of the ship, the pilot grinned (or, he would have if he had a mouth), and accelerated towards the Voot. The Meekrob could shape their energies into bodies when floating in mid-air, and the pilot was currently in the default form for his kind: A whitish disc of energy, run through with small vein-like structures that circulated energy, a small head with two photon-absorbing 'eyes', and a few frills and stuff for adornment.

The pilot laughed when he got a close look at the Voot: Whereas his ship was a sleek, aerodynamic needle, Zim's craft was the spaceship equivalent of a tortoise with a leg injury. There was no way that lump of metal was ever going to match his ship's speed, and the fool would have to swerve into the energy field to avoid impaling himself on the Meekrob ship's prow.

The pilot laughed out loud, until one of his wing mates, recently recruited, yelled over the speaker: "Sir! Sir, you've gotta get out of the way! It's a-"

"Wait," The captain said, in a derisive tone, "You're worried about that… _thing_? He's gonna blow up in the magnetic storm!"

The captain rolled his 'eyes'. Really, he didn't have to be so much of a baby: Even though this Zim person seemed to be braver than he thought, he would still have to break off sooner or later from this little game of aerial chicken. Oh well, this particular rookie _was_ a little nervous, and he couldn't expect-

"Sir, that's a _Voot class_ ship!" The recruit's voice came again.

Icy dread filled the pilot. A Voot also _turned_ like a turtle with a broken leg: There was no way Zim was going to make the turn in time.

The pilot banked hard left, but he wasn't fast enough. The heads-up display quickly counted down the distance: Fifteen feet-ten feet-five feet-

"Oh, _ship_."

The Voot slammed into the Meekrob ship's side, snapping the thin craft in two. The pilot hovered in mid-air frozen with shock as his craft hurtled downwards, shattered beyond recognition. He looked down at himself: Still alive.

He turned to look at the Voot, burning up from friction heating and broken fuel lines as it plummeted towards the reddish ground.

"Fools!" He laughed, "Don't you realize that we Meekrob are invincible?!"

The pilot laughed triumphantly for the better part of three seconds, when a lighting bolt from the energy cloud blew him into photons

In one of the two remaining craft, the new pilot sighed, "That's gonna look bad on the résumé…"

Meanwhile, Zim was employing an ancient, time-honored tactic of land a craft that even the worst pilots could pull off with full success.

That is to say he crashed.

The Voot slammed into the ground, sending unfortunate rocks that got in its way flying through the air. They burrowed a trench thirty feet long into Meekrob's hard red rock, before coming to rest (rather painfully) at the base of a large rock.

For a few seconds all was still. Peaceful silence replaced the chaos and turmoil. A small insect scurried up to the battered side of the pod, staring at the new arrival to its planet with innocent curiosity. A second later, Skoodge's head appeared above the insect, exciting it even more, until he vomited all over it.

"ZIM!" Skoodge said furiously, after catching his breath, "That was the worst flying I've ever seen! The Voot is totaled!"

"Nonsense!" Zim said, spitting out a few teeth, "And be thankful there were no bees."

"Bees? What do bees have to do with… Never mind. I don't want to know."

Zim clambered on top of the rock, and quickly scanned the valley below them, eventually finding the Meekrob's main above ground base. Skoodge, already stained uniform covered in dust, pulled himself over the edge a few seconds later.

"See anything?" He panted.

Zim looked at him like he was an idiot. "Of course I see things! I've been seeing things since I was a smeet! I can't remember a time when I couldn't see anything."

Skoodge sighed. "I meant the prison."

"Oh. It's right over there." Zim said, gesturing towards a building with 'Off-Worlder Prison Center' written on it in big capital letters.

"How'd you tell?" Skoodge asked sarcastically, rapidly becoming disillusioned with the mission.

"Never mind that now: We need a plan… GIR!"

The little robot fell out of the sky, and landed on his head, saluting his diminutive master.

"GIR, initiate infiltration plan number 346.723! Skoodge, brace yourself: This requires a bit of stamina…"

GIR ran back to the ship to get supplies while Zim started fiddling with something in his pocket. Skoodge felt his antennae droop: This wasn't going to be pretty, he could tell.

A few hours later, inside the Meekrobian prison, Invader Tenn came to. She blearily opened her eyes, and quickly scanned the interrogation room: She was shackled to a hard metal chair, harsh light shining into her eyes emanating from the full-spectrum lamp turned to full on the table in front of her. In the darkness surrounding her, threatening, sharp objects loomed in the gloom. She would have rolled her eyes if it didn't hurt so much: This was a classic psychological trick.

Why had it all gone so wrong? The Tallests had told her she was going to get her own Megadoomer Assault Mech to use in her conquest of Meekrob, and a few days later she had gotten a package full of defective SIRs. They had ransacked her base, blowing things up, and had eventually destroyed the cloak-field generator for her base. She vaguely remembered fighting the crazy little robots off, when one of them had knocked her out.

She cringed at the thought of the Meekrob showing up, and seeing the great Irken Invader passed out on the floor in her own base, defeated by a shipping mistake. _That _was worse than anything the Meekrob could do: Even if she escaped, she'd never live it down.

Somewhere in front of her, a door slid open. The room was lit by the glow of the Meekrob interrogator, who flicked on the light a second later.

"Why was it so dark in here?" He asked.

"As if I would know." Tenn said, taking a new look at the room. It was actually pretty small, full of vending machines. Tenn frowned: Why did soda cans look so much like torture equipment?

"Well, anyways-" The Meekrob said, suddenly switching to a low, threatening voice, "Welcome, little Irken, to Meekrobs most feared torture facility. I think that you'll find your stay here much more… _pleasant_ if you spill your little meaty guts right now. So why don't you-"

"Why is the most feared torture facility on Meekrob full of vending machines?" Tenn asked, cutting him off.

If it was possible for a being of pure energy to blush, the Meekrob was doing it right now. "Well, there were some budget cuts, and, uh, we only got two interrogation rooms, and one of the last prisoners was sick in one, and we're still using the other, so… We put you in the break room."

Tenn tried (unsuccessfully) to hold back a round of laughter. The Meekrob looked hurt. "Hey, don't make fun of us! PREPARE FOR SCREAMING AND… UH… ITCHINESS! YEAH, ITCHINESS!"

Tenn scoffed at the ridiculously dramatic tone her interrogator was using. "Itchiness? What, did the real torture equipment get repossessed?"

The Meekrob barely managed to avoid saying 'Who told you!?', stuttered angrily, and left the room. Tenn shook her head and chuckled, until the Meekrob returned with a strange, three-pronged bladed device.

A wave of fear washed over her, but she bravely yelled at the Meekrob. "Do what you want, but you'll never get me to talk! Never!"

Despite his lack of a mouth, the interrogator grinned, and pulled a all-too familiar object into the room.

Raw, icy terror welled up inside Tenn, sapping her resolve and bravado in an instant. "No…" She whispered, antennae falling flat on her scalp from fear.

At this point it might be best to explain a little bit of galactic education: Before the transition to all-digital learning, Irkens taught their children in schoolrooms that might be recognizable even on Earth. Granted, the subjects were more focused on mathematics and science, but they employed much of the same equipment (though slightly different) as conventional Earth education today. When the Irkens switched to computers and holo-projectors, huge amounts of school supplies and teaching equipment had been rendered useless. The automatic trash disposal units who came to remove these items were still using an outdated price index, and didn't know the objects were suddenly worthless. Deeming most of the junk to be to valuable to throw away, they were stored indefinitely in great vaults in the under levels of Irk. Sometimes, however, when a section was under repairs, a few items from these vaults would be taken out and would circulate throughout the galaxy.

Which explains how the Meekrob had gotten a hold of a chalkboard, and knew how to use it to its full potential.

The Meekrob extended a tendril towards the metal object, and used a magnetic field to, slowly but irregularly, rake it across the chalkboard.

Tenn screamed as the horrible noise hit her antennae, and started desperately pulling against her bonds, trying to escape.

The Meekrob cackled, but was interrupted by a sudden loud _THUMP_ coming from his right. He, chalkboard-scraper hanging at his side, turned towards the wall, while Tenn tried to recover from the screeching noise.

Another thumping noise, closer, reverberated through the building. The Meekrob could hear screams. What the-

_BOOM! _The wall exploded inward, sending the vending machines flying, soda spraying everywhere. The Meekrob panicked and ducked under a piece of rubble, even as another chunk went straight through him. Energy, remember?

He looked up, shakily: GIR was standing in the newly-made opening, dressed up uncannily similar to a U.S. Marine, holding a buffeted rubber piggy like a gun. Zim stumbled into the room, followed closely by a dazed Skoodge, both wearing sombreros and bad fake mustaches.

Tenn stared, open mouthed, at her 'rescuers'. GIR squeezed his piggy, making a noise exactly like a gun cocking, and aimed its snout at the bewildered interrogator.

"Let 'er go, and no one get's hurt." GIR said, in a surprisingly intimidating voice.

Skoodge ruined the effect by yelling "Popcorn! Not cheesy popcorn! Nooooooo… It gets stuck in my teeth!"

Tenn turned to Zim as the Meekrob nervously untied her. "What's wrong with him?" She asked.

Zim shrugged. "Punch drunk-"

"Those mushrooms were _gooooooooooooood_!" Skoodge cut in.

"-among other things." Zim finished.

The Meekrob finished untying her, and cowered in a corner looking fearfully at GIR's 'weapon'. "D-Don't hurt me," He pleaded, "I just work here!"

Tenn stretched, trying to get feeling back into her legs. "Well," She said nonchalantly, "My PAK legs are broken and my ships gone."

Zim smiled. "Oh, don't worry: Ours' is to!"

The trembling Meekrob whimpered. "This is madness…"

Skoodge, who had been flopping around on the floor for the past few seconds, leapt to his feet and cried: "THIS-IS-SPARTA!"

Tenn shook her head, and ran off through the hole, followed closely by Zim.

Skoodge staggered a bit, then triumphantly proclaimed, "You shall always remember this as the day when you _almost_ captured Invader Skoodge!" In a bad imitation of a pirate accent.

GIR jumped into the air, activated his rocket feet, and flew off, grabbing Skoodge by his shirt collar on the way out.

The interrogator whimpered again in his corner. He was going to look into that job offer at Shloogorgh's, that much he knew…


	5. Mission Unlikely, Part Two

"_It's fun to stay at the**: R-E-S-ISTY!**__ It's fun to stay at the: __**R-E-S-ISTY!**__"_

Lard Nar tapped his foot (or stilt-leg… Thing), to Shloonktapooxis's new theme song, headphones covering up the places where his ears should be. The catchy lyrics were doing nothing to cheer him up. He stared at the greasy members of the Resisty, which had recovered, somewhat, from the downright embarrassing incident with the _Massive_.

The crew of the Resisty's _other_ Vortian ship (seriously, there were a _lot _of those things lying around) milled around, depressed. The stop at Foodcourtia hadn't gone well, and the entire ship was slick with grease. The once gleaming control panels were covered in batter, and the panoramic view of the universe given through the bridge's great bubble window was marred by great streaks of butter. Lard Nar pulled off his grimy goggles to check on the progress of the cleaning crew, leaving two clean patches in an otherwise filthy face. Among the janitors was an all-too familiar alien.

"Tell me again…" He began, glaring angrily at Spleenk.

Spleenk winced. He knew what was coming.

Lard Nar jumped off his chair and walked towards him, each word emphasized by a heavy footfall, "WHY-DO-I-KEEP-LISTENING-TO-YOU!?"

Spleenk sighed, "I don't know…"

"Oh, really?" Lard Nar said, leaning threateningly over Spleenk, every word carrying with it the full weight of his annoyance, "Then do you know why you suggested to put forty thousand Blorchian lizard-chickens into that blender? Do you know why you told us to 'just leave the radioactive potatoes alone'? And as for the beaver costumes-"

"Nearing Planet Vort." The computer announced through its sticky speakers.

Lard Nar looked up from the cowering Spleenk, and saw the rocky sphere of Vort growing larger by the second.

"Home…" He breathed, giving Spleenk a chance to scurry away. He straightened up, all attention fixed on the seemingly ordinary Irken occupied planet.

He gazed longingly at the yellow-green orb that was rapidly expanding to fill their entire field of view. Images flashed through his mind: White capped peaks towering over the steep valleys, freakishly tall trees that had grown so well in the low gravity, the shining research station where he had done the basic planning for the _Massive_ in the years of Vortian-Irken peace. Abruptly, he saw a Irken space station orbiting over the planet, and images of violence, war, and the local Shloogorgh's Flavor Monster boarded up with a 'Out of Business' sign. He felt his horn-things twitch in fury. The Irkens had much to answer for.

"Alright, men," Lard Nar said, whirling around to face the crew, "That's planet Vort there. It's my home, but it was also once the capital of the Vortian Federation. Now it is nothing more than a research facility to crank out new machines and weapons for the Irkens. Today, we shall free huge numbers of Vortians, and double the size of the Resisty as well. Since our last ship was destroyed in the ill-advised attack on the _Massive_," Here he stopped to shoot Spleenk an angry glare, 'We have to build up our navy. Vort is the best place to start: Billions of people who can look back to clear memories of freedom, with the bitter taste of conquest fresh in their minds. We will attack the primary Irken command center; Which, luckily, is in outer space, aboard that station. We will attack with our large, powerful ship, and overwhelm the basic defenses they have put in place. After looting the station for supplies and new ships, we will go down to the planet, and evacuate as many of the prisoners in the research facilities, laborers in the cities, and resistance groups hiding in the countryside as possible. By the time the Armada even gets here, they will find nothing but an empty space station (rigged to blow up), their prisons burning to the ground, and an inspired people filled with fresh hope!"

The crew of the Resisty cheered, most of them just glad that Lard Nar hadn't broken down with cries of, 'We're gonna die!', yet. The leader of the Resisty marched proudly back to his seat (slipping on some unidentifiable meat halfway), and started to give commands:

"Shloonktapooxis, I need you to ready the laser cannon; Cleaning crew, you've got to work faster than that; Spleenk… Lock yourself in a closet and don't say anything."

The Resisty's ship deactivated its cloaking device, and barreled at full speed towards the Irken space station. The new ship was shaped essentially like an elongated football, but shared many abilities with the one lost in the attack on the _Massive_, including the laser orbs (A large, powerful weapon that wasn't actually connected to the ship, for better aim and insurance reasons).

The Irken space station, in contrast, was obviously standard-issue. The basic body of the station was a thick, flat disc, covered in dozens of needle-like towers, which held hangars, communications, and most likely the sensors that were only now alerting the Irkens to their presence. The towers, and hangars on the main body of the station, began to spew fighters towards the Vortian ship.

Lard Nar, however, was in an equally combative mood: He was covered in grease, miffed that the Irkens didn't give his planet extra protection, and sorely wanting to kick some Irken backside. He glanced down at his miniature HUD: They were now only a few hundred yards away from the Irken base.

Lard Nar swiveled in his chair to the power re-router technicians. "I want 80% of engine power diverted to the shields and weapons."

They nodded, hit a few buttons, and then went back to their power flow monitors. The ship's rate of acceleration immediately cut off, and Lard Nar began to direct the movements of the Resisty's dogfighters, staring intently at the readouts, giving his all to the battle. They had to win, and he would not miss a thing. He leaned forward to the view screens, determined not to give any attention to anything but the battle.

Fifteen seconds later, he failed to notice a small metal object fire out of the space station, while being engrossed in the shiny thing Spleenk found in the closet.

* * *

Tenn crouched behind the rock, warily glancing at the Meekrob prison facility. "So…" She said, turning to her would be 'rescuers'. Skoodge had fully recovered from Zim's odd plan, and now was in what she assumed to be a hangover. Skoodge was now mumbling things about the plan, most of them having to do with the rather unnecessary effects. Zim was sitting next to him, mumbling that he could be a better 'team player' when confronted by hallucinogenic moustaches. GIR was… sucking on an object from the prison better left not described.

Tenn blinked. "What are we doing?"

Zim looked up, then pulled off his sombrero in a businesslike fashion, "Well, the Voot's down, and your base is probably a smoking lump of metal by now… We can steal a Meekrob ship!"

Tenn sighed, "Zim, Meekrob ships don't have life support. They can't hold more than twenty minutes of air, and my PAK isn't operating well enough to handle breathing for me."

Zim laughed, "Oh, yes, foolish Meekrob. They can't even design a ship with life support!"

"Zim, they don't _need_ life support. They're energy thingies, remember?" Skoodge cut in.

Zim whirled on Skoodge, "You dare challenge the incredible intelligence of ZIM!? Besides, even if I _were _an energy thingy, I would've designed ships to match the Irken body structure for fear of incurring my wrath!"

Skoodge gave him a deadpan look. "_You'd_ let your _enemies_, including _yourself_, get away… To avoid incurring _your_ own wrath?"

"YES! I AM ZIM!"

"Both of you shut up!" Tenn snapped, "Do you realize the Meekrob can ambush us at any moment?"

Tenn glanced back up over the rock: There were no Meekrob yet, probably because of the radiation storms. Still, they notoriously fickle magnetosphere could calm down in an instant, and then there would be no way they could hide for long. She glanced up at the sky, noticing that the top and bottom of the storm were becoming polarized…

An idea formed in her mind. It would be exceedingly dangerous, but not as bad as staying here and waiting for the Meekrob to show up.

Tenn turned to Zim, and asked, "What's the condition of your Voot?"

"It's definitely not flyable: The engines are shot. The internal systems are working okay, though, so we'll have shields, life support, maybe even a fully functional power supply. Zim's ship _is _amazing!"

Tenn nodded, then asked, "Where is it?"

Twenty minutes later, the group was struggling to fit inside the crumpled ship.

"Zim, get off my foot! Skoodge, go in the back by GIR!" Tenn yelled, shoving the shorter Irken off of her.

"Aww, it smells back there!" Skoodge complained, ignoring the dirty look Zim shot him for using the word 'smells' in the same sentence as something he (the amazing ZIM) owned.

"NOW!"

Skoodge squeezed back, and tried to find a spot that did not smell of animal urine.

Tenn pushed Zim back before he could start hitting buttons, and activated the communications. After a few seconds of static, the Tallests appeared on the screen.

"My Tallests, with some help from Zim and Invader Skoodge-"

"Hey, why'd you call _Skoodge_ an Invader?!" Zim butted in.

"-I was able to escape from the Meekrob prison." Tenn continued, ignoring Zim.

"That's great, soldier, but… The ship you're in seems to be kinda broken." Red said through a mouthful of chips.

Tenn smiled, "I know, my Tallests, but by using the magnetic storms, I think we can- Hey, Lir! How's it going, buddy!"

* * *

Back on the Massive, Vem arched her non-existent eyebrow. Lir seemed to have the ability to know and be friends with countless people at a time, even if he saw them less than once a year. This was getting weird.

Lir just smiled, and returned Tenn's air high-five. "Nice to see you, Tenn! Let me guess: Ol' Skutch's frat- party trick?"

"Exactly! Just without getting expelled from the Academy."

Lir nodded. "That's going to take some styrofoam. You have any down there?"

"No."

"Oh well… We'll have to use double up here. Triple, to be safe. When can we expect you to get here?"

"Um… twenty minutes, I think. The storm'll be at it's worst then."

"Okay, and the angle of trajectory?"

"We're going for straight upwards."

Lir nodded. "See you in twenty minutes."

The screen went blank, and Lir floated over to a pilot's consol, and began typing in coordinates.

Purple frowned. "What was that all about?"

Lir, not looking up from his work, said, "You remember Invader Skutch?"

"Uh… Yeah. He was chosen for the Great Assigning, wasn't he?" Red said.

Lir nodded, typing furiously, "I'm surprised he made it. He was a fairly good Invader and all, but he was a little reckless. He tried to go E-wave surfing on Devastis."

_That_ cleared things up: E-wave surfing was a pastime all school-aged Irkens were familiar with, and were forbidden from doing. On a planet that had been completely, or even a fifth, urbanized, like Devastis, they would start using decommissioned military ships for buildings. It was a smart idea: The ultimate mobile home, complete with its own reactor, storage centers, air conditioning and security systems. Most of the ships were gutted of these parts for various purposes after a while, but on some of them they remained.

On the larger ships, you could have crater-sized engines still perfectly able to start up. If one was facing straight up, or even at an angle, it could be used for E-wave surfing. In E-waving, you got either a specially designed board or a charged piece of metal, and jumped out onto an engine, which would have been running at very low power. The thrust from the engine would be too little to actually move the craft, but it would create a cushion of ionized particles that you could 'surf' on. The board, carrying the same charge as the particles, would hover on the field, allowing you to zip around and pull stunts.

The system was far from perfect, however: If any part of your body moved out of the protective shielding of the board, the charge difference would rip you off and electrocute you in an instant. The inventor of the sport had perished when the engines had accidentally been set too high for the board. It had been… Messy.

And now Tenn was going to try something similar with the magnetic field of an entire planet.

* * *

Back on Meekrob, Tenn was messing with the inside of Zim's Voot: Add a wire here, cut one there, and voila. She smiled, and wiped the grease on her already-black gloves on the nearest available object (Skoodge's shirt).

She moved back up to the control panel, ignoring Skoodge's complaints, and hooked up her PAK to the computer. Turning back to her rescuers, she told them to do the same, and to put their personal shields on high. The craft lit up with the light of three bluish-white spheres (GIR had to share Skoodge's).

"Why are we doing this?" Zim asked, uncomfortably squeezed between Skoodge and Tenn's shields.

"Zim, you remember Skutch, right?" Tenn said, hitting buttons on the control pad. With a dull whine, the ship powered up.

"Yeah. Wasn't he expelled for E-waving?"

"Exactly. You know how the magnetic storm above us is charged?"

"Yeah."

"Well, there are actually three charges: The lowest level is positive, the second level is neutral, and the third is negative. We're going to charge the outer shell of the Voot negative, so we can get up to the first layer. Then, without slowing down, we switch to positive to pull us through the second layer to the third, when we switch back to negative. Negative repels negative, so we should be pushed into outer space even faster. The _Massive_ will catch us there. We need our shields up, because the Voot can't be running its shields while we're switching."

Zim paled. "You… You're crazy! Skutch almost killed himself!"

Tenn grinned, finger over the last button. "_Almost_."

Before either Skoodge or Zim could do anything, Tenn hit the button. She had trained for a few years as a pilot, and she took every opportunity to go as fast as possible. Still, this was a little much.

They shot upwards, accelerating so fast their shield bubbles deformed under the heavy hand of acceleration. Tenn whooped with excitement, her eyes focused on the altitude readout: 1455 feet, 1564 feet, 1789 feet-

Suddenly, the Voot began to shudder violently, and little arcs of electricity shot through the holes in the hull. The extra power the ship was providing would help them hold out against the energy, but sooner or later the massive forces would break through.

Just when they were starting to slow down, Tenn hit a second button, and the forces inside the craft abruptly doubled: Acceleration resumed anew, electromagnetic forces pushed them up from below, and forces from the third layer pulled them up from above.

Zim spouted colorful curse words he had picked up on Foodcourtia while his head pounded from pressure, Skoodge whimpered for his Robot Arm, Tenn made a mental note to smack herself if she ever made it out of this, and GIR decided now would be a great time to give everyone his version of some Earth songs:

"AND I THINK TO MYSELF… I'M GOING TO HURL!"

"GIR, SHUT UP!" The Irkens screamed in unison. The electromagnetic energy threatening to kill them had died down, but it began to pick up again as they entered the third layer. Tenn noticed hairline cracks spreading through the cockpit bubble, and sucked in a deep breath of air before it exploded.

Immediately, the air rushed out of the ship and three pinkish bubbles enveloped the Irkens heads. Zim and Skoodge's disappeared after a few seconds, but Tenn's remained translucent, a hazy pinkish orb around her head, threatening to pop at any moment.

As they entered the third and final layer, blue sparks began to flit around their vision. Tenn stretched forward, hand over the button, waiting for the numbers to reach a certain value. They did, and Tenn slammed her had down on the button.

If their previous accelerations could be considered extreme, this one must have been approaching sluggish from the other end. In relation to its mass, the Voot shot out forty times faster than a cork from a champagne bottle, sending them hurtling into the vacuum of space, and popping Tenn's air bubble.

She immediately fell to the floor, mouth open as wide as she could get it, exhaling as fast as she possibly could. The near-zero pressure of space had caused the gasses in her equivalents of lungs (air sacks in the squeedlyspooch) to quickly expand, trying to find a way out. She had helped them along by pushing them out into the considerably larger area of space, but the rapid decompression had still damaged her lungs. She coughed up a few droplets of green fluid, a mixture of Irken blood and body fluids.

Zim stared in shock as Tenn silently hacked up her internal fluids. Even as the incredible cold and unadulterated light of outer space began to hurt him, he still could only focus on one thought:This is _my _Voot. She'd be fine if I had fixed the window.

The pang of guilt was quickly replaced by shock as they suddenly shot through an air-retainment field into a hangar on the _Massive_. Zim slammed into the wall, almost cutting himself on the sharp metal, and just sat there in a daze as the outer layer of his skin thawed.

Tenn gratefully sucked in the stale air of the ship, before woozily standing up. "Zim…" She said, wiping some blood off her lip.

Zim could only manage a, "Uh-huh…"

"Don't _**EVER**_ let me do _anything_ like that again."

GIR snored in the corner, using Skoodge's passed out body like a blanket.

* * *

Review, or Brazilian-ninja-turtles will destroy Luxembourg! MUAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAH!


	6. The End of the Beginning

Tallest Purple had a headache.

Ordinarily, he was an easygoing, laidback, fun-loving guy who would rather be eating something than conquering worlds. In addition to that, some of Lir's sheer apathy towards life had definitely rubbed off on him during his time on the _Massive_, and now he could barely be bothered with things like banging his head, or accidentally drinking the wrong kind of soda (Red always kept a pack of his 'Asteroid Dew' stuff in the fridge).

But _headaches_… They were a whole other kettle of proverbial fish.

He hated them with a passion: That gnawing, persistent pain that was not severe enough to get you out of work, but made it impossible to focus. It was horrible, feeling his own head turn against him like that. He sometimes felt like his skull contained another, malicious person, bent on controlling him from its fortress on top of his neck.

It didn't help that when he got headaches, they were always bad: If they wheeled in that Meekrob-to-Irken transmitter that made a whining noise, headache. If he was stressed out, headache. If he got dehydrated (or whatever it is you get when you don't drink enough Irken beverages), headache. All of those factors were now contributing to the doozy of a migraine between his ears.

In truth, his headaches were no more severe than anyone else's, and it was more that he was being melodramatic, but today he was just in a bad mood. Formality dictated they try and force some ridiculous protection payment out of the Meekrob, but he really just wanted them to grow up and fight already.

Purple glared at the translucent energy-thing on the screen, enjoying his presence about as much as the Meekrob enjoyed having the Irken Armada hovering over their planet.

Currently, Vem and the Meekrob were 'negotiating': The Meekrob demanded retribution for the attempted conquest of Meekrob and the subsequent break-in, while Irken pride demanded a sum of money large enough to compensate for their wounded egos.

Oddly enough, the whole affair had only inflated Irken pride, and propaganda was already circulating of what three Irkens had pulled off after an ordinarily catastrophic mistake.

That didn't make negotiating any easier:

"We want 200 billion monies, and we'll leave Meekrob alone. You can have your little planet, but you can't expand."

The Meekrob on screen considered this. "No, we don't wanna."

"You _will_ give us our monies."

"Nuh-uh."

"Yeah-huh."

"This is going to take a while…" Lir mumbled, taking out his third soda for the hour.

Vem, realizing that this was making her look stupid, decided to threaten the Meekrob : "Then we'll blow your planet into dust."

"And destroy all those monies? I can see the headlines now: _Irken Armada destroys their compensation money after the disastrous failed campaign on Meekrob_. That'll look good in the history books… Fifty billion."

Purple frowned. This was stupid: They had more important things to get on to. He wouldn't have to _do_ anything, of course, but it still was probably important. He decided to cut in, and, in one of his smarter moments, called out: "Oh yeah? How about: _Almighty Tallests, enraged by cowardly attempt at bribery, destroys impertinent planet._"

Sudden silence filled the bridge, and the Meekrob nervously fidgeted on screen. Never underestimate an Irken's power to put a spin on something.

The negotiations were about to start up again, more aggressively this time, when suddenly a small metallic sphere hurtled out of the blackness of space, and smashed through the bridge window. A loud _whoosh_ accompanied this, but a thick metal covering automatically covered up the gap, stopping the airflow before anyone got sucked out.

Of course, a few stacks of paper and a janitorial drone got pulled out, but nobody cared about him anyway. He probably could just use his PAKs auto-bubble thingy anyway.

What they _did_ care about was the strange metal pod in front of them. If one had a little knowledge of galactic engineering trends, it was plain from the same 'patchwork' style of the pod that it had been made by Irkens. It also helped to know what the big Irken symbol on the side meant.

A technician slowly walked up to the pod, and tentatively stuck a hand out to it.

He looked up at the Tallests, and quickly gave him his findings. "It appears to be a message pod, originating from the Vort system command base, The outer surface is freezing, but its too warm to have been in space for more than a few hours."

Vem frowned. "How can you tell?"

"Outer space is about four Kelvin. If the pod had gotten close to that temperature, atmosphere would be condensing on the side."

Suddenly, a series of clanking noises reverberated through the pod, and a hatch slid open. Strange, grey fog poured out of the opening, rising to the ceiling as a long, robotic spear of some kind shot out, affixed itself to the ground, and bent like an enormous spider leg. Another followed, and a horrible rasping noise tore through the room. The legs flexed, lifting a strange limp lump of mater attached to their base, waving strange ribbons of unidentifiable matter in the mist.

The crowd gasped, and took a collective step back as the object began to rasp hideously. Was this some horrible demon from beyond the stars? Was it a unholy fusion of robot and neurons come to seek revenge on its creators? Had the Tallests forgotten to pay the gas bill _again_!?

Suddenly the strange object thrust itself forward out of the mist, revealing-

"I can't breathe in that thing!"

A slightly overweight Commander in charge of the Vort system. The robot legs had just been ordinary PAK legs, and the strange lump had just been the commander himself, stretching after being confined for so long.

The crowd sighed. Right when it had gotten interesting…

Lir grinned. "Hey, it's Grapa! How's it goin'? Look at you… Nice outfit. You a commander or something?"

Vem threw up her hands in frustration, and stalked off to get a snack. She made a mental note to check on just how many people were on his friends list on FacePAK.

Red and Purple exchanged glances. When they found out that Skoodge had conquered Blorch, they had immediately realized that the short, fat Invader would now be the poster-boy for Irken universal domination. They had shoved him into the 'Organic Sweep Cannon' used after the conquering of planets to cleanse them of any and all alien filth. Granted, the Organic Sweep was nowhere near 100% effective (they needed slaves to work on the new planet, and who wants an irradiated dustbowl anyway), but it was a nice formality, and it still was very powerful. Grapa had been chosen as the new 'Skoodge', and the public was happy to ignore the fact that their 'Invader' was fake.

Of course, Grapa had no actual talents, so he was reassigned to a well-paying, easy job as Commander of the Vort system. Why he had to break in through the window inside of a message pod was beyond the Tallests, but it obviously wasn't good. More importantly, they had to make Lir stop calling Grapa, 'Grapa': Everyone thought he was the Skoodge who had conquered Blorch.

Purple quickly made a diversion. "Hey, what is going on with that garbage can!? Is that Lir's robot in there?" He yelled, in an obviously fake voice.

Lir didn't fall for the trick, but he got the hint. "Oh, better take care of that… See ya, Grapa!"

Lir hovered off, and Red diverted the coming questions by quickly talking to Grapa, diverting everyone's

attention. "Soldier, why are you here? Is something wrong in the Vort system?"

Grapa quickly dropped to his feet, not wanting to offend the Tallests by increasing his height, saluted them, and quickly reported: "Approximately four hours ago, a Resisty attack force appeared on our sensors close to the base. We began to fight, but they had the element of surprise. They took the base in about twenty minutes, and I was cut off from the escape pods. Wishing to alert my Tallests, and to not be dead, I hollowed out this message pod that you see here, and added rudimentary life support. I apologize for interrupting your diplomatic negotiations," Here he gave a dirty look to the Meekrob, who had been watching the scene with growing interest, "And for smashing through the window. I fear the Resisty will be getting stronger by the minute, and I feel it is imperative that we get back to the system immediately."

The Tallests exchanged glances, then began barking orders to the crew. "Turn the ship around, and alert the fleet. Prepare to leave for Vort system immediately! And as for you," Red said, turning to face the Meekrob, "This discussion is not over."

"Well, my Tallests, I'd say I wish you good luck, but I don't want to lie to you." The diplomat responded smugly.

Red just growled, and turned to prepare the ship for superluminal travel.

* * *

In the med bay, the three heroes of the rescue mission were just waking up. Zim sat up with a groan as the ship shuddered past light-speed, glancing around. He was sitting on a cot, with Skoodge passed out in the one next to him and Tenn in the one next to Skoodge. He had vague memories of stumbling off the remains of the Voot, and being swarmed by an array of doctors.

He smiled, glad that it was a matter of national pride that he would not die. The smile faded when he felt the gap between his teeth. The mission was barely a success: They were lucky to be alive.

Another look around completely wiped away the smile, and replaced it with a wince. On the white wall opposite their beds, there were large screens displaying several aspects of their bodies. All of them had fractured or broken bones, and it would take a few more hours, even with advanced Irken medicine before they could be used again. A sudden tiredness swept over Zim, and he realized his aching body could probably heal faster if he was asleep. He lay back down, and told his PAK to send his brain a few sleeping chemicals.

Within a few minutes, he lost consciousness, and sank into blessed, wonderful rest. What he did not know was that in a few hours, being asleep would be more dangerous than anything.

* * *

The Resisty had done very well on Vort, very well indeed. First, they had found hundreds, maybe even thousands of ships in the station and on the planet. Second, they managed to free every Vortian in the Research Prison center, and still had more than enough room for the horde of volunteers seeking to get off planet and help with the fight.

They had allowed people into the Resisty quickly, but methodically: You were allowed on in order of how much you would suffer when the Irkens came back, skill, importance to the Irkens, how much you could give to the Resisty, and finally what order you were in line.

All in all, the Resisty was now over four million strong, swollen with huge numbers of refugees, soldiers, families, and cooks (Shloonktapooxis couldn't make enough food for everybody). They completely drained the planet of all military matériel, rounding up and imprisoning the Irkens inside of the vacant prisons, and sent their space station hurtling away to a fiery demise in the Vortian sun.

All good things must pass eventually, though. The Resisty could not hold the planet when the full force of the Irken Armada came, and so they planned to leave a few hours before the Irkens showed up, investigating the cause of the stopped signals from the station. They did not know that Grapa had warned the Irkens earlier than they had thought, and that they were going to show up at about the same time they were planning to leave.

Still, they had a head start, and were almost far enough from Vort's planetary gravity well to make the jump to light speed.

Lard Nar was giving a speech to the people of Vort before they left, hoping to inspire confidence among his people:

"And when those Irken fools show up, long after their target is gone, you can proudly endure their slavery confident in the knowledge that resistance is possible! You can fight back! Ladies and gentlemen, I swear, WE WILL BE BACK!" He yelled into the holocam, broadcasting his image and words across Vort.

The people of the planet cheered en masse as their heroes left: "RESISTY ROCKS!"

In this moment of triumph, one of the happiest so far in the lives of many Vortians, the unthinkable happened. Thousands of Armada ships poured out of hyperspace, followed closely by the _Massive_ itself. The holoboards across the planet suddenly displayed a second screen, filled with the angry visages of the Almighty Tallests themselves.

"So!" Red said with folded arms, doing very well at scaring the pants off the inhabitants of Vort, "Trying to have a little rebellion, eh? Well, don't worry, we'll deal with you after we blow up your friends out here."

He turned towards one of the technicians, and gestured for them to start up the ships. The Irken nodded, and began to relay orders to the entire fleet.

Back on the Resisty ship, Lard Nar was in a panic. "Full speed ahead! Charge up the weapons, and prepare for combat with the Irkens! Spleenk, give me ETA on when we clear the gravity field!"

Spleenk, his banishment to the closet over, began to fiddle with buttons and stare at the screen. "We'll be clear in about five minutes. The Irkens will reach us in three."

Lard Nar sighed. They would probably get away, but it would be far more costly than he would have liked.

All this was displayed by the screens down on the planet. The Vortians watched horror as the Irkens rapidly closed the distance between the fleets. Just when they were about to reach them, a _third_ face appeared on the screen, belonging to an Introi.

Of course, nobody there knew what an Introi was (with the exception of Lard Nar, who had met them at the

last Heroes of the Anti-Irken Resistance, or 'HAIR' awards ceremony), and this unknown alien visage was frightening. The signal for this third faction was being relayed from a small recon ship that had appeared somewhere between the Irken and Vortian fleets.

The alien, Scly Evcoth to his people, 'Weirdo' to his friends, raised his arms and called out to the Vortian people in surprisingly flutelike tones, "_Twiwip, kivlipov lu kozmivig Vort!"_

He coughed, "Which, in your language, is probably something like 'Hello, people of the planet Vort!'"

Everyone's emotional gears had been overtaxed today, and they responded to this new alien with open mouths, silently wondering if he planned to eat them.

The alien fidgeted. "Is this a bad time?"

Lard Nar suddenly grinned in his section of the screen. "Scly! You finally showed up! We were just running away from the Irkens when you guys got here. Mind giving us some help?"

"Oh, so those are the Tallests!" Scly said, turning his attention to the screen where Red and Purple stood, dumbfounded, "Well, I have to get through with the formalities," Here he picked up a sheet of paper with incomprehensible writing on it, "Ahem: _Leaders of the Irken Empire, we, representatives of the Natrian Empire, must demand that you immediately cease and desist all extremely immoral acts, under threat of war. These include enslavement, totalitarian/autocratic government, attempted genocide, grand theft aero, illegal genetic tampering, and mass mind control. If you do not stop, we must inform you that we take full ethical right to attack you, and eventually overthrow you._" Scly looked up, and asked in a tone that signified that he obviously knew what the answer would be, "Do you comply?"

The Tallests recovered from their shock, and Red angrily yelled at Scly, "No! We will not stop! The Irken Empire is an unstoppable force, and none shall halt its glorious conquest! Come and fight, and we'll get rid of two potential threats today!"

Scly shrugged. "Suit yourself."

Suddenly, the patch of space behind the recon ship twisted and distorted. The ships' sensors began to scream warnings at their Irken commanders, detecting an enormous lump of gravitational pull at the center of the distortion.

Purple gaped, "What the-"

Suddenly, a wormhole appeared in the patch of space, a gigantic white disk that existed for less than a second, spitting out a huge battle-fleet of thousands of alien ships. Sitting at the center of this newly formed enemy fleet was an enormous oval craft, tipped by engines at one end, and a massive concave depression at the front. At the center of this depression the bridge was nestled against the dangers of space, and ringing it were three massive prongs, each of which extended the total length of the ship by 50%. The sleek white hull was dotted by long lines of thousands of weapons emplacements, hangars, and missile tubes. The ship was so mind-bendingly large, that even with the most basic of estimations, it was clear that it matched the size of the _Massive_ itself.

Scly grinned as he watched the Tallests' jaws drop. He smiled at Lard Nar, who returned it with a salute, as the Resisty fleet turned to help the Natrian Armada.

The people on Vort once again cheered with renewed vigor. Just as it was easy to tell apart the grey, utilitarian Resisty ships, the red, insect style Irken ships, and the silver, curves-coming-to-points themed Natrian ships, it was easy to know the Irkens were going to have a very tough fight, if they won at all.

The Natrian fleet suddenly lurched into life, accelerating towards the confused Irkens. From his place in the tactical room, Scly gave orders to his fleet, represented by purple on the holo-map, suggestions to the blue-colored Resisty ships, and pointed out targets amongst the red-labeled Irkens. After a few seconds of orders, it became clear that Scly was setting up a one-on-one confrontation with the _Massive_. Other Natrian commanders regarded this plan with interest.

Their train of thought went something like this: Scly had designed their super-ship, the _Victory_, from the ground up, and he knew better than most what it was capable of. He had studied the _Massive_ for hours, and if he says we can handle them, we probably can.

* * *

A sudden shudder woke Zim up. A medical drone had injected him with a stimulant to wake him up, and it had already moved on to Skoodge and Tenn. He jumped out of bed, looking happily at his x-rays on screen: Irken medicine had succeeded completely, and all of his injuries were healed. He felt his teeth with his tongue, and could barely find the gap between his older teeth and the new replacement that was growing in.

The medical drone, after ensuring Skoodge and Tenn were well, floated back a bit and relayed their orders: "Zim, you and Skoodge are to bring Invader Tenn back to Irk, where she will be reassigned. The Tallests insisted that you not participate in the battle, and instead hurry Tenn home."

Sudden excitement gripped Zim. "Battle?" He asked, eyes growing wide, "Someone is trying to attack us!? I'll destroy them! They shall rue the day they dared challenge the revolting might of Invader Zim!"

If a robot could sigh, the medical drone was doing it. "The Tallests specifically ordered you to not participate. They said that you were to valuable to risk in battle, and you could do more good bringing news of the attack to Irk anyways."

Zim nodded sadly, and saluted the robot, "Yes, it truly would be disastrous if something should happen to me. But as soon as Tenn is safely on Irk, THEY SHALL TASTE THE POWER OF MY WRATH! I AM ZIM!" He screamed, waving his fists in the air.

Tenn snickered. Skoodge gave her an odd look, and asked "What's so funny?"

She grinned and pointed at Zim. "It's funny watching him get so worked up: It looks like he's gonna have a seizure."

* * *

Purple sighed in relief, watching the whole scene on screen.

"Hey," He said, turning towards his co-Tallest, "Your plan to get rid of Zim actually worked!"

Red smiled, "Why so surprised?"

* * *

Vem floated down the hallway, looking for Lir. He had disappeared the second the battle started, and Vem wanted to find out what her slightly-subordinate colleague was doing. She hovered into the hangar, and saw Lir lifting up a soda machine and shoving it onto his personal craft.

Vem stared, mouth agape, as Lir pushed a snack machine after it, and sat down with a can of cola.

"Uh, Lir," She began, "What are you doing? I don't know whether you're deserting or re-decorating."

Lir looked up from his drink, a rarely-seen annoyed look on his face. "I'm no traitor, Vem: I am simply preparing for the worst. If the ship is taken, I want to have a fast get away ship with adequate supplies."

Vem frowned. "You do know the odds against them taking the ship are astronomical, don't you?"

Lir returned the frown. "Let me answer your question _with_ a question: What were the odds you'd end up as a Taller?"

Vem rolled her eyes, but she did stay near the hangar for the rest of the battle.

* * *

Back on the bridge, Purple was staring at the _Victory_ as it moved ever closer. Nothing about those three prongs made any sense: They were not enormous weapons, because there were no barrels for the beam, and because they'd be impossible to aim. They couldn't be shield projectors, because they were so oversized. They couldn't be weapon towers, because they were no more heavily covered than the rest of the ship.

He glanced down at the screen. None of the enemy fighters appeared to be helping the _Victory_ in its attack: Even with the massive size of the enemy, they should be getting as much help as possible.

And the oddest part of all was that they continued to accelerate, even as the _Massive_ rushed forward to meet them. They should be slowing down to attack, perhaps with the ever popular 'broadside' tactic that had first become popular in naval battles in actual oceans. But no, they seemed to be intent on getting as fast as possible. They probably had some surprise breaking system to stop them and confuse the enemy.

But if they didn't, it looked almost like they were going to ram them…

Cold realization hit Purple, as all the dots connected: Those protrusions were for spearing, not shooting. They were going to impale the _Massive_.

For a few long seconds, all he could do was stare at the ship, noting how strongly reinforced the prongs were, the way they curved slightly, to make it impossible to dislodge during the battle.

Finally he snapped out of it, and began yelling at the crew: "Hard to port! Hard to port! Brace for impact!"

Red turned with surprise as Purple screamed at the technicians like a man possessed, waving his arms, and calling for the full evacuation of certain parts of the ship.

He didn't see the point, and tried to calm him down, until Purple yelled into his face: "They're going to ram us!"

* * *

Meanwhile, Zim was piloting the fully repaired Voot out of a hangar in the ventral section of the _Massive_, cheerily pulling off little tricks as he admired how well the ship had been fixed up. GIR was still sleeping in the corner, having been left undisturbed by repair crews (He scared them). Tenn and Skoodge were each trying to maximize the cramped space in the Voot, while at the same time trying to get a good look at the battle through the window. The _Massive _had broken off from the direct, head-on confrontation with the enemy vessel, and was now facing away form it, turned to about the '7 o'clock' position in relation to the _Victory_, and accelerating its incredible bulk as fast as it possibly could.

Tenn frowned. Something about the setup seemed wrong to her: It looked like the _Massive_ was fleeing. But that was just ridiculous.

* * *

Scly smiled as he saw the _Massive _try to turn and run, his finger over the button that would activate the boosters, staring intently at the holographic representation of the ship. Almost there…

On the _Massive's_ bridge, all was quiet. Every technician there was trying to squeeze as much thrust out of the engines as possible. Suddenly, the _Victory_ leapt forward, massive booster engines churning out huge amounts of energy. The heads-up display on the screen quickly counted down the time until impact:

5-4-3-2-

* * *

Zim stared in shock as the outer shell of the _Massive _crumpled, and gave way. He couldn't believe it, but the enemy had just incapacitated the _Massive_. Skoodge's mouth fell open, but no sound came out. Tenn buried held her head in her hands with shock. This couldn't be happening.

* * *

With a horrible screeching sound of metal on metal, two of the _Victory's _prongs drove themselves into the _Massive_, pushing apart recently-evacuated decks like they were paper. Eventually, the ship came to a halt, firmly connected to the _Massive _now. One of the prongs had punctured the main power line for the _Massive, _and ended up dangerously close to the bridge. The other had gone up through the ship, and was near the shield generators. The third was hanging out in space.

Scly grinned. _Perfect_.

* * *

Lir uncurled from his fetal position, and glanced around. Several of the mechanics at work in this hangar, which was reserved for use by theTallests and Tallers, were woozily getting to their feet. Vem was hovering nearby, a shocked expression frozen on her face.

Lir resisted the temptation to say 'I told you so.'

Soldiers poured out of the second prong, and took over the shielding station at the top of the _Massive. _No soldiers moved to stop them: They assumed that the Natrians would be boarding them near the bridge, and were determined to stop them from taking over. Scly quickly relayed instructions to the hackers going to work at the shield generator, his grin growing wider all the time. The Irkens were responding exactly as he had planned.

Within a few minutes, they had complete control over the _Massive_'s shielding array. The first thing they did: They turned it off. They were in no danger of being attacked by the allied Natrian-Resisty forces, and the Irkens wouldn't attack their own ship. Next the switched the polarization on the generator. Now, it would project a field _inside_ the ship.

Finally, they entered a long code into the projector, to replace the shield. They waited a few minutes for the generator to get ready, and pulled the switch.

_

* * *

_

Vem yelped with shock as her head was suddenly filled by a long strip of binary code. It remained burned into her vision for a few seconds, and when her vision cleared, she was even more shocked than before.

Every single Irken in the hangar, in the hallway, and indeed, in the entire ship, had slumped over on the ground, and were snoring gently.

Lir had several slung over his shoulder and was hurrying towards his shuttle. He turned and gave her and yelled "Don't just stand there: Grab some!"

* * *

The Tallests stared, dumbfounded, as every technician, soldier, and janitor on the bridge did nothing. They were comatose: Purple had tried shaking them awake, but they didn't respond.

Red looked around, and stared at the ceiling. "That was a PAK control code…" He whispered. "They used the shield generator to send a command into the PAK of every Irken on the ship. They told them to go to sleep until further notice. Us and the Tallers are the only ones here with uncontrolled PAKs…"

Purple felt his blood pound in his head. "What does it mean?"

Red slumped over, staring at the floor. "It means they have a copy of the Irken PAK command book… It means it's over… It means we lost…"

"It means you're right." A cold, angry voice said.

Purple looked up. An enemy soldier was standing in the doorway, holding up a weapon. He cocked, aimed- and suddenly everything went dark.

* * *

Zim stared at the _Massive_. It was now displaying a Natrian symbol to the entire fleet. Entire squadrons simply gave up and were captured, unwilling to fight without their leaders. They were beat, and they knew it.

The remaining Irkens who wished to fight represented about a fourth of the Armada, the rest having given up or captured in battle. Zim slumped in his chair, shocked beyond reason.

Tenn ran up, and began pressing buttons. "We've got to tell them to retreat to Irk. They'll listen to us. We were the last ones on the _Massive_. We've got to convince-"

"No," Skoodge sighed, "Irk is to far away. The Voot is a long range vehicle, but the rest of the Armada is going to have to refuel before we get anywhere close."

Tenn sighed, and typed a new message to the captains of the remaining ships.

* * *

Lir groaned as he read the two messages from Zim's Voot: _We've got to get out of here, or we will be destroyed._ and _We can't go to Irk. We need a more local system._

Lir leaned back in his seat and frowned. He and Vem had managed to escape with twenty soldiers, but it was a worthless victory if they didn't have anywhere to go.

Ironic, that Zim, who had spent the last few months on a faux mission should be one of the survivors. Wait a minute…

Lir typed in a question: _Can we use Earth as a base?_

* * *

Tenn considered the query on screen. It wasn't perfect, but it would do. They could regroup there, and survive long enough to rejoin with the rest of the Armada.

A few minutes later, hundreds of Irken ships disappeared from the Vort system. Scly sighed and leaned back in his chair. Even though the war was far from over, Irken power would never be the same again.

* * *

Review, or a musk ox will devour Topeka!


	7. Moving in

"_It is a commonly held misconception that an Irken's body is merely a shell, and the PAK is the brain. This is simply not true: If it were, why wouldn't the Irkens put themselves into more destructive, resilient, and efficient robots? They remain tethered to the PAKs because of their deficient Squooch glands (We can thank Vio for that), but an Irken's PAK rarely thinks for the host. There _are_ times when the host body cannot function properly, due to the imperfect structure of Vio's Na-3Cl-5, but these are the exceptions rather than the rule. The PAK _is_ an Irkens closest companion, however: An indispensable ally that sustains them, keeps them loyal, and arms them with an array of tools. Separating an Irken from their PAK will have varied results, but do to a combination of shock at their imminent doom, and the very real effects of the chemical supply running out, they will be much more accommodating (If desperate)."_

_-_Naida Entorro, on Irken cyborg technology.

* * *

"Now, some like to romanticize the Mongols: They claim Genghis Khan fought his enemies because they offended his people, and it was a matter of 'honor'. While I disagree with this _completely_, I have to admit that using prisoners as a human shield was quite effective."

Dib sat in his chair, head resting on one hand.

That was about it.

He obviously wasn't listening to the lesson, as he wasn't planning on committing suicide in the foreseeable future. The usual flurry of anti-Zim plans was gone, along with the alien himself.

Dib glanced across the room. Ms. Bitters was droning on about the capture of Samarqand, the words 'MONGOL INVASION' written across the board in big capital letters. Most of the other students were completely ignoring the lesson, with the exception of Keef, who appeared to be writing something in his notebook.

Keef looked up and saw Dib, then waved the page he had been working on in the air, a proud grin plastered on his face. Dib rolled his eyes: It was Genghis Khan skipping with a bunch of people through an enormous field of flowers, holding little chains of flowers while bunnies skipped around.

Keef was getting ridiculous with this whole 'Keef's Revised History of the World' thing he was doing. There weren't any fields of flowers in central Asia anyways.

He continued to scan the room, his gaze sweeping over a few of the schoolchildren (Earning him funny looks and Zita sticking her tongue out at him), before coming to rest on Zim's desk. Zim had been gone for a week now, and he was getting annoyed. The house was deserted, he hadn't seen GIR at his usual hangouts, and there hadn't been any 'freaky floating moose' reports in a long time. Well, actually, there _had_ been one yesterday, but it wasn't purple.

He turned back to Ms. Bitters, who hadn't taken notice of Zim's absence at all. She was going on about how Kublai Khan ruled China. With a sigh, Dib began another fruitless attempt to sleep with his eyes open.

* * *

Meanwhile, out in space, the leaders of the Armada remnant were holding a discussion in Zim's space station. Lir, Vem, Skoodge, Tenn, Zim, and several other fleet commanders were seated around a large table. The hologram projector in the middle of the table was displaying a large, three-dimensional image of the Earth. Zim, of course, was pushing for immediate world conquest.

"Come on!" he yelled, slamming his fist on the table, "We are the _Irken Armada_, people! Let's just blow the humans up, and force them to do our bidding!"

"Zim, we're what's _left_ of the Irken Armada." Lir said with a frown, "We do not have the forces, or the time, to conquer and pacify a planet of six billion hostiles."

"Oh, please, the humans? What threat do they pose?" Zim asked, rolling his eyes. Nobody could see, since they were monochromatic, but they were pretty sure what he was doing.

Vem shuffled some papers in front of her, "It says here that several of the more developed nations down there are armed with nuclear missile technology. One of those could put a _big_ hole in our fleet, and we need every ship we can get. I say we just hide out at your base until we can repair all of our ships, and get a signal through to Irk. We'll find out what to do from the Control Brains, and rejoin with the fleet after that. We'll drive back those aliens eventually, but in the meantime, we need to lay low."

Zim frowned angrily, and was about to make another speech, when Tenn cut in, "Besides, Zim, this way _you _get all the credit for conquering the Earth. It wouldn't look good in the history books if 'Invader Zim made some headway on conquering the planet, before the Irken Armada did it for him'."

Zim opened his mouth to make a witty comeback, realized that would make him look stupid, and closed it again.

* * *

Dib walked home from school, bored out of his enormous skull. He had nothing to do until Zim got back, he still had to deal with Gaz, and tonight's Mysterious Mysteries episode was just a rerun.

He looked up at the clouds, which were making their lazy way through the heavens. All was normal, until-

One of the clouds shifted.

It did not move in the normal sense, but _rippled_, like milk in water. A few seconds later, he saw a second ripple, farther down. It was almost imperceptible, but it was there: An all-too familiar shape making its way through the sky. Dib grinned: Zim was back. He took off running towards his house, remote-activating his alien sensor array...

* * *

Zim, on the other hand, was not nearly as excited. The cloaking device was acting up again, and the Dib-monkey could probably see it. Tenn, acting commander of the Armada, was crammed inside with Skoodge and GIR yet again.

Lir had given her his command after Vem had a panic attack. Vem had been fully ready to organize the fleet, until she realized that the Tallests were probably dead (Or at least captured), and _she_ was the new Tallest. This had been too much for her to handle, and she passed the command down to Lir, who didn't want it.

Tenn didn't really mind, and intended to use her position to the best advantage of the Armada. There were certainly perks to her new job: She had full command over 4,576 Irken soldiers, and a shiny new Commander badge. She fingered the gold star Lir had stuck to her uniform, wondering whether it was real metal or a gold-colored sticker. She was going to be one of the first into the base, and had to learn as much as she could about Earth.

Skoodge and GIR were coming with because they didn't have another ride.

The Voot disabled its cloaking device, and descended into the attic. Tenn looked up as the two halves of the roof closed over their heads, nodding at the impressive display. The exterior of Zim's base looked absolutely ridiculous, but it seemed to blend in, and was equipped with the impressive array of Invader-standard technologies. It would do nicely.

The little group clambered out of the Voot before it sank into the floor, and Zim led them down the stairs to the seldom-used second floor of the house. It was all one room, completely devoid of furniture except for a small computer terminal built into the wall. Two windows, a large one built into the front and a smaller one in the back of the house, gave the occupants views of the cul-de-sac and the yard. Zim walked over to the panel and hit a few buttons. Moments later, to Tenn and Skoodge's surprise, two walls shot out of the floor and squared off a fourth of the room.

Zim turned towards Tenn, and jabbed a thumb at the new room. "You can use that as your room, and the rest of the floor as a planning center. It'll probably get crowded don in the actual base, so-"

"Hey!" Skoodge whined, "Why don't I get a room? Everyone else is getting actual beds, but I sleep in the air vent! I've been here for months, and you could have given me an entire room the whole time? I could've at least gotten a place to sleep!"

"Skoodge, number one, I'm giving them places to take breaks and rest, not _sleep_ like you do," Zim said, making a face at saying the human word (Much as it annoyed Zim, Skoodge had taken up sleeping as a pastime), "Number two, Tenn is a Commander. On top of that, you still owe me rent for that vent you're sleeping in!"

Tenn rolled her eyes, and walked into her 'room', ignoring the continuing argument. It looked out part of the big red window on the front of Zim's misshapen house, giving her a nice view of the street.

She accessed her room's own terminal, and ordered the computer to give her a bed, a few storage shelves, and a computer.

"Please move to the side of the room." The computer said in its eternally bored voice.

Tenn did so, and watched a pre-fabricated bed (Used when an Irken needed a breather, as opposed to actual sleep), closet, and computer desk beam into the room. A small tube poked through the ceiling, an interwoven web of such tubes, and spat a good-sized computer onto the desk. Tenn nodded, satisfied: It would do when she needed a little privacy, and most of the new residents would get far less.

As Tenn turned to leave, the computer spoke up again. "Hey… You're not Zim."

Tenn frowned. This computer seemed a little… Chatty. A new interest entered its voice as it asked her, "What's your name?"

"Um… Tenn."

"Haven't had many new people here in a while… What are you doing here?" The computer asked. If she hadn't known better, Tenn could have sworn the computer seemed a bit _desperate_. Then again, it was on a strange alien world, and appeared to be connected with other human computers. It was possible that the machine could develop some… quirks. Immediately she felt pity for the poor computer, as self-aware as anyone else, but stuck with no one to talk to but Zim.

"Well," She began, hoping to cheer the bored computer up, "A section of the _Massive_'s fleet got stranded in space after a battle, and we're coming here to regroup. I'm the acting fleet Commander."

Genuine excitement entered the synthesized voice. "How many will be staying here?"

"About five thousand. I'm sure you'll find something to do." She said, walking towards the door. The computer made a small whirring noise that Tenn was sure signified excitement.

The big argument outside had gotten worse: Skoodge and Zim were wrestling around on the floor, shouting things like 'You sleep in my basement!' and 'I conquered a whole planet of Slaughtering Rat People! You can't even handle a few pink monkeys!'

Tenn sighed, tightened her gloves, and walked forward to separate them.

* * *

Dib's glasses shone, reflecting the light of several monitors as he looked everything over: The camera he had planted on the house of one of Zim's neighbors showed the roof opening and closing repeatedly, there was something big being transmitted between Zim's space station and his house, and the security system around Tak's ship showed that nothing had happened in the pas thirty-six hours, and even then it had only been a squirrel getting shocked on the force field.

That was odd. Dib leaned back from the screen, and enlarged a feed from the garage camera. The ship was still there, hidden under a tarp. Tak had gotten a new ship after she lost the first, but she usually tried to steal the old one back every once in a while. About a month ago, though, Tak had just disappeared: She had gotten in another space battle with Zim, and got launched into space… Again.

Dib shook his head, deciding Tak's disappearance didn't mean anything of immediate importance. It might turn out to be a problem later on, but he couldn't do anything about it for now.

Instead, he took another look on the transmissions between Zim's base. The big satellite dish was focused on Zim's station, and appeared to be receiving huge amounts of energy, the same wavelength as his teleporters. Gaz had used the system to get herself up to the station when he had been captured by Zim.

It looked almost like-

* * *

-Hundreds of Irkens were pouring into Zim's base.

The basic principle of teleportation was small holes in the quantum fabric of the universe. A person would be scanned, their information and a large amount of 'guiding' energy would be sent to a second receiver, and the teleported person would pop out of the firs area and into the second, following the energy beam. The physics behind this little twist of science has never been really understood, but it sure is useful.

Zim had moved and hooked up the twenty-odd teleporters in his base, and had set up a system where Irkens would step in on the station, beam down, and step out so someone else could teleport through. The whole process would take about an hour and a half, and several of the technicians felt uncomfortable that it would take so long to get back and forth. The computer, meanwhile, was churning out more living space: Thick tubes would tunnel through the rock, eating it up and converting it into long strips of housing units, more than fulfilling Zim's promise of 'A bunk an Irken'. Still, it was going to be very crowded. Some Irkens, particularly those who would be repairing ships back in outer space, needed rooms near the teleporters, while others complained of being to far from everything. In the end, the computer had to build a series of barracks, meeting halls, mess halls, charging stations and more teleporters radiating out from the actual base, which was quickly becoming a congested traffic hub.

The second level of the aboveground 'house' was getting just as crowded: Tacticians, commanders, and the Tallers themselves were constantly in the room. There was always a steady stream of traffic between the toilet and trashcan elevators and the stairs, though Zim warned them they would have to move in a hurry if a human broke into the house. Vem got a newly made room next to Tenn's, and Lir had specifically requested the backyard.

Zim collapsed onto the couch, and stuffed some chips into his mouth. He technically had the first floor, attic/hangar, and several off-limits rooms down in the base to himself, but the attic was full of communications equipment, and there were no less than fifteen Irken hurrying through the kitchen at any given time.

GIR burst through the door carrying a pig over his head with a cry of 'SLUMBER PARTY!', and barreled towards the toilet. He actually had the biggest room in he base, but no one was complaining (It reeked in there, and the majority of the new inhabitants were worried the fumes were poisonous).

The computer seemed happiest with the changes, and was happily chatting it up with the soldiers. Using his omnipresence and parallel processing capabilities, he was capable of holding multiple conversations at a time, and had made friends with half the base. This was of little importance, as far as Zim was concerned, but the computer did seem a lot happier and more compliant, which was good.

Zim sighed, and ate another handful of nachos. _Oh, well,_ he thought, _I can handle this until we can contact Irk._

* * *

Vem hovered past the planning room, noticing that Tenn was adjusting nicely to the position. Vem smiled, glad that Lir had found such a good replacement for her: She had been doing fine until she realized she was in charge of the _entire_ Armada, and had freaked out.

She hovered down the stairway, stopping suddenly to let GIR run by with a pig, and floated into the tiny corridor next to the right of the kitchen, which led out the back door to a screened-in porch. Lir had set up a bed, recharging station, storage unit, soda machine, heater, and a little force field projector that overlapped over the screen. Another little door led out into the yard, where Lir had set up two trees and a hammock.

Vem nodded and turned her head towards the strange, cylindrical device to the right of the door when she realized that there was a _human _in the hammock. The human glanced at the porch, saw her gaping there, and waved.

Vem looked around in a panic, not sure whether to run inside or tackle the human before he got away. She ended up waving her hands in the air and yelling: "I'll lay eggs in your brain! They'll eat you alive!"

The human looked at her for a second, then laughed in a voice that was undoubtedly Lir's.

Vem stood there, arms hanging in the air like a monkey's, mouth open in shock, as the human got up and walked over.

"Catching flies?" Lir-Human asked, arching an eyebrow. He was about twenty-eight in human years, tall, and if Vem knew anything about human races, Italian (A personal touch Lir thought was funny).

Vem shut her mouth, going pale, before finally stuttering out: "Th-that thing in the corner… Y-You didn't-"

"-Use a Vortian bio-synthesizer machine? Yes. Yes I did."

Vem paled with fury, arms jittery. Vortian bio-synthesizers stored your actual body in a stasis dimension, while creating a new one to hold your intelligence in the meantime. They allowed you to instantly become a member of another species, permanently if you wished. They were strictly illegal, though it was only to prevent Irkens from finding and enjoying new freedom as another species, and staying that way.

Vem didn't know this, but she did know what the law said. "Lir! Do you know what the punishment for that is?"

"It _was_ I a six-thousand money fine and having your PAK fed through a wood chipper, but I legalized it for Tallers before I got in."

Vem was furious. Sure, Lir had the authority, but he shouldn't be using it like that! She was about to use her half an inch of authority to order him back, but then he said something that caught her completely off-guard:

"I made one for you to. I figured you'd need a few days to get used to your position, and in the meantime you could help me find out more about this planet."

Vem was stuck yet again in a stuttering, frozen position. Lir was making sense, a novelty worthy of fireworks, but he had just bent the law to his will. She decided to head back inside and stay uninvolved, when Lir raised the ante beyond her level of self-control:

"I _dare_ you."

* * *

Review, or the enchiladas will be sacrificed to King Kong!


	8. It's a small world after all

"_If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?"_

_ -_Albert Einstein

* * *

For a very, very, very long time, the Earth was only the home of its own life. Nothing on the planet squelched, moved, and metabolized on the planet, without an ancestry in one of its own primordial seas.

Then one day, an alien and his robot landed on the planet, and sought the undermining of the human race. This, in a galactic sense, is not very extraordinary, but for the Earth, it was the first time ever. In fact, so unlikely did this seem to the humans, that they simply ignored the possibility. Even when the Invader marched through town wearing no disguise more complex than a wig and contacts, they saw him as a short, odd little person, and never thought about him again. The one person who _did_ see through his disguise was regarded as crazy and annoying to his people, and was duly ignored for it.

The 'Invasion' of the world might have continued indefinitely in an eternal stalemate, until the number of aliens on the planet suddenly increased by a factor of thousands. Now the stakes were higher: It would increase the chances of the aliens' discovery, but it also meant Zim had a larger pool of resources.

And yet, he was still doing the same stupid things he had done in the fruitless six months he had spent on the planet.

"Tell me again," Zim said, adjusting his wig in the living room, "Why are you coming with?"

Tenn was fiddling with her PAK, shimmering as it readied a holographic disguise, eventually turning her into a ordinary-looking girl of the same age as Zim's skoolmates. Her clothing was simple: Navy blue pants, a red shirt adorned with the bottom half of the Irken Imperial logo, and military style boots. Her human hologram had straight brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, wandering blue eyes that nonchalantly took in everything around her, and nothing at all that would draw attention to her. On many levels, she blended in far better than Zim.

Motivation was not one of those levels.

"Because," She said, pulling on a boot, "I'm the Fleet Commander of the Irken Armada, I'm stuck on this planet without enough working ships to blow up an anthill, I want to know what this place is like, and I'm _bored_."

Zim shrugged, pushing open the door, "Can't argue with that logic."

If they had paid more attention while walking to the Skool, coming up with a human identity for Tenn, they might have noticed Lir and Vem walking towards the city center. Lir was dressed in typical Lir fashion, in an expensive looking suit… With no tie, an unbuttoned jacket, and an 'I'm with stupid' t-shirt with an arrow pointing up at his head. Vem was wearing more inconspicuous clothes, and trying, in vain, to put a damper on Lir's flamboyant attitude. She herself was in a human body, red-haired and thin.

If one was familiar with someone using the bio-synthesizing machine, they might notice an uncanny resemblance between them and their bio-synthesized body: The scientists who had made the machine programmed it so that it made your other body look like you would, had you actually been born among that species. The shape of the face, the way they moved, the way they held themselves, even their voice, would connect them irrevocably to the person who had been given his form by a computer.

Lir was currently holding a strange piece of human cuisine, paid for by perfect-replication alien counterfeiting, and singing the praises of the meaty tube.

"Oh, Vem, you gotta try this 'Chilee Dawg' thing that guy gave me!"

"Lir, number one, that's pig intestine stuffed with spam. Number two, it's covered in little things shaped like organs."

"They're beans."

"Beans?"

"Little plant things. If you put them in the ground they grow more beans. Weird, huh?"

Vem frowned. "Why not just make them in vats? Why put what you want to eat in the ground?"

"I don't know," Lir said, a mouthful of food in his mouth, "But apparently they give you gas?"

"What does that mean?"

"I looked it up on 'Wik-ee-pee-dee-ah': 'Flatulence is the expulsion through the rectum of a mixture of gases that are byproducts of the digestion process of mammals and other animals.'"

"That's disgusting!"

"Yeah, well, that's what your new body is going to do," Lir said, immensely enjoying the look of horror on Vem's face as she stared down at her stomach, "I also learned a song about beans."

Vem looked up, her face contorted in terror. "Lir, don't-"

"BEANS, BEANS, THE MUSICAL FRUIT, THE MORE YOU EAT, THE MORE YOU TOOT!"

Vem groaned, and massaged her temples as Lir belted out the lyrics in his horrible singing voice. The Tallests had once considered hiring Lir to sing to prisoners, but decided against it, on the grounds that it was too inhumane.

Noticing the odd looks of other humans, Vem grabbed Lir by the arm and dragged him away, even as he sang: "THE MORE YOU TOOT, THE BETTER YOU FEEL, SO EAT BAKED BEANS WITH EVERY MEAL!"

* * *

Zim did no know that one of the most important leaders in the Irken Empire was singing about flatulence, he did not know when Tenn would be done convincing the principal to let her in, and he most certainly did not know what today's lesson was about. He knew he was guaranteed a passing grade if he just wrote 'doom' for all the answers on a test.

In fact, he _had_ done that once, and Ms. Bitters had given him an A-, and a request to 'be more specific'.

He was currently in a staring contest with Dib, who had looked a little relieved to see Zim back. Life without your arch-nemesis can get pretty boring.

_Honestly,_ Zim thought as he glared unflinchingly at Dib's over-sized head, _That kid needs to get a life. He should have realized by now how_ amazing_ I am, and how helpless his little dirt ball is. He needs a hobby._

Suddenly, interrupting the fast-paced stare-off, there was a knock at the door. Ms. Bitters had actually bored _herself_ to sleep, and woke with a start, looking around the room in confusion. The knock came again, and Ms. Bitters quickly rose and moved to the door.

Outside, the vice principal was standing next to Tenn, who smiled and waved at the class in an attempt to look normal.

Dib frowned. There was something weird about this girl. She seemed too energetic, too aware of her surroundings. It was a little weird… But then again, this skool had a history of weirdness. Old Kid, Keef, and Tak came to mind.

On top of that, Zim seemed to be paying attention to her. Dib looked down at her shirt, and immediately recognized the bottom half of the Irken symbol. Immediately, he remembered the huge amount of activity at Zim's base.

He groaned, and sank further into his seat. Not _another_ one…

Ms. Bitters briefly attempted to scare off the vice principal, threaten him, and maul him before he could drop the child off in her class, but apparently being a civil servant made you fearless. He simply shoved Tenn into the classroom, Tenn still beaming, and ran off down the hallway before Ms. Bitters could get him.

Ms bitters sighed, and moved in her serpentine fashion to the front of the room next to Tenn. Tenn stood there, unmoving, smiling as she unblinkingly stared at the class. Obviously whoever this was hadn't learned human concepts like blinking.

Ms. Bitters gave Tenn pretty much the same introduction as Zim's: "This is Tenn. She will be replacing Tak in our class. I'm sure all of you horrible, doomed children will have much in common with her, and will play nicely. Now, to continue with the lesson… Doom, doom, doom, _dooooom_!"

Tenn walked (A little stiffly, Dib noted) to the side of the room, and sat down in the seat behind him. She obviously was much better at blending in than Zim was, and Dib probably could have believed she was human, if not for the shirt, and they way Zim watched her until she sat down. He tore a piece of paper out of his notebook, wrote '_I know what you are._' on it, crumpled it up, and tossed it over his shoulder.

He heard Tenn unfold it, silence for a few seconds, and then the paper came sailing back over his shoulder, neatly folded into a triangle.

_I don't follow you. _What_ am I?_

Dib wrote his response, _An Irken._, and simply handed it back to her. Ms. Bitters was beyond the point where she cared about note passing.

The note came back: _I don't know what you're talking about_.

Dib rolled his eyes, and wrote a new message on it. _Don't_ _play dumb: I've learned it all from Zim. Irkens come from planet Irk, your backpack is really a metal thing called a PAK with spider legs and equipment in it, you have antennae, green skin, no nose, no ears, zipper teeth, and big monochromatic eyes that can be popped in and out without much injury. You burn on contact with water (H20 in chemical terms), your leaders are the Almighty Tallest, and you're trying to conquer the universe. Quit smiling like that: It gives you away, and it looks creepy._

He tossed it over his shoulder. This time, it took about a minute to get a response, and when he did get it, it slammed into the back of his head.

He opened it, and was greeted by a much different writing style:

_Alright, monkey, it seems that Zim gave away quite a bit. He is, after all, an idiot. I'm going to keep this simple for you: DO NOT MEDDLE WITH THE IRKEN EMPIRE. I can assure you that we will be doing nothing against the humans, aside from Zim's usual antics, and we are only here to regroup. Do not threaten men, human: Zim told me what position you have in your society. I doubt that your fellow humans, if they could not see through Zim's disguise, will believe _you_ when you accuse _me._ Rest assured that I find you interesting, in that you managed to hold your own against the might of Irken technology, and will not have you destroyed, either now or when the Earth _is_ invaded. This offer will be revoked the moment you pose a serious threat to the Irkens at Zim's base. You have _no _idea who you're dealing with._

Dib leaned back into his chair in surprise, realized that brought him closer to the creepy Irken, and leaned forward again. For the first time, he realized just how pathetic Zim was in comparison to his own kind.

He made a mental note to tease him about it on the way home.

* * *

Lir, much to Vem's chagrin, had discovered the human concept of 'amusement parks' and was now screaming his head off as he spun around and around on a ride. Most people avoided the street carnival, for reasons involving smell and the liability wavers they were forced to sign at the front gate. Lir was giddy with the rush of unfamiliar chemicals to his new human brain, however, and he had yet to learn that vertigo and disorientation were bad things.

Slowly, the giant ride Vem had decided was a form of torture that spun you to death ground to a halt. Lir wobbled out, and grabbed the nearest stable railing to avoid falling over.

"That…was… AWESOME!" Lir yelled. Vem rolled her eyes, and grabbed Lir by the arm, dragging him over to the nearest trash can. Lir protested, saying that he felt fine, but Vem pushed his head over the trash can all the same.

Lir had 'felt fine' the last time, when he had bent over. Vem, fearing that Lir could of poisoned himself, rushed over to help… A second before Lir threw up all over her.

When she felt enough time had passed, she let him get up from the trashcan. "I said I was sorry," Lir complained, eyes watering from the stench.

"Sorry doesn't cut it," Vem said, eyeing in case they were trying to capture and dissect them, or sell them insurance (That had been horrible), "Now let's get back to the base before the FBI sees us."

Lir groaned loudly, closely mirroring small children being dragged home by their mothers. "But I don't _want _to!"

Vem sighed. Lir's apathy towards life had turned into a full-blown obsession with human recreation. All he wanted to do was see how the humans lived, what the humans ate, and how they could survive water. Lir had his first experience with the ordinarily deadly chemical when he had gone down the log flume, and now he tried to get wet whenever possible. Personally, Vem didn't like water: The slippery feel of the stuff creeped her out.

Eventually, Lir stopped whining, and simply followed Vem as she led him back through the convoluted streets that refused to help pedestrians orient themselves. Eventually, Vem stopped to ask for directions.

Lir glanced around, and saw a travel agency built into the bottom floor of a building, tempting him with inviting images of huge stretches of water. He turned back to see Vem trying to coax directions out of a confused tourist, not realizing he didn't speak English. With a mischievous grin, Lir slipped off into the one-room store, and looked down at some pamphlets.

Vem, meanwhile, had gotten someone else to tell her how to get back to the suburbs, and had discovered that Lir was suddenly gone. She looked around for something Lir would have gotten interested in, and immediately headed off to the travel agency. She stuck her head inside, and was immediately greeted by Lir running up to her with several informative (and expensive) guidebooks he had found.

"Vem, look at this! The whole planet is divided up into these 'countries' things, and most of them don't even talk the same language. How cool is that!?"

Vem frowned. "Wait, Lir, you're telling me you had _no_ idea this planet wasn't one nation?"

"Yeah! I thought the smallest you could get with empires was a planet. Much smaller than that, and there's no point, is there?"

Vem stared at Lir as he raved on about how their biggest country was only 6.5 million square miles, or how the had a country that was only part of an average city, and realized just how naïve Lir was: He had been born and raised in the heart of the Irken Empire,. Become a taller at a comparatively early age, and had nothing to do ever since. Of _course_ he would be fascinated by this new, diverse world that wasn't constantly striving for universal domination.

While she herself found this disunified, leisurely, unproductive little backwater world tiresome and weak, Lir loved it, and now had something to focus on. Lir would always be apathetic towards his work and the Irken Empire, but Vem realized that his would be good for him, and give him something that really mattered to him.

Her thoughts were suddenly interrupted when Lir said, "We should go there!"

Vem blinked. "What?"

"Europe! There's a lot of stuff over there, and I hear they have a country where they drink nothing but boiled water with dried leaves stuck in it."

"Do you _want_ boiled water with dried leaves stuck in it?"

"No. But there's other stuff."

In that moment, Vem realized she had a new duty among the remains of the Irken Armada: Making sure Lir didn't kill himself while messing around on the Earth. Lir was now completely absorbed with Earth, and he wanted to experience as much of it as possible, with or without Vem. Vem didn't have anything to do at the base until the day they left Earth, and she didn't want Lir sticking his metaphorical nose into dangerous stuff.

She sighed. Lir had been so much more manageable back on Irk…

"Fine."

* * *

Tenn frowned, turning off her disguise as she sat on the couch. "It was more… Depressing than I thought."

Zim sighed, "I think the Bitters-Demon wants half the class to jump off a building by the end of the year. Even if this planet is headed for annihilation at the Zimmy hands of _ZIM, _she is merely lessening her chances of survival. Oh, how she will pay for the last English test…"

"Actually, when you got past the depressing parts, some of the history was good."

Zim looked at her like she was crazy. "Why would anything about the _Earth_ be interesting? It is merely a pathetic ball of spinning filth. It is _nothing_ compared to the mighty glory of the Irken Empire, or of its greatest Invader! Me! I AM ZIM!" He cried, jumping up on the couch and waving his fist in the air.

Tenn was going to say the parts on warfare (Which, indeed, had taken up most of the class), but instead decided to pose a simple little argument against Zim's enormous ego: "If the Earth is so worthless, why are you conquering it?"

Zim's triumphant smile froze into a look of confusion. He stood there, stiff, trying to figure out a good response.

Tenn rolled her eyes: She knew enough about Zim to know he'd be spending the better part of the evening stuck like that. She walked to the fridge, got a soda, and flushed herself down the toilet to see what was going on downstairs.


	9. Of Bob and a Turtle

"_You're dead for a real long time, there ain't no way to prevent it; So if money can't buy happiness, I guess I'll have to _rent it_!"_

-'Weird Al' Yankovic, _This is the life_.

* * *

Planet Sleazybackalleyia kept the Imperial 'obvious-naming' scheme, but it had little else to do with the waning power.

The whole place was a refuge: A no mans' land that law-enforcement groups knew well to stay out of. Drunks, thieves, and used car salesmen prowled the lower levels, looking for other unfortunates to steal from. The upper levels were home to the more notorious criminals and mobsters who had managed to build up fortunes. Foremost among them was a new, shadowy figure, who somehow amassed 1.2 billion monies.

The tall city of space-scrapers was full of neon and plasma lights, advertising every possible vice in the most direct of ways, and the gleaming glass towers seemed to stick into the smoggy sky out of their lowly origins like fingers from the grave. This was a planet of such decadence, lawlessness, and debauchery, that even Qilsmopolis in the Spire cluster of the far-off Natra galaxy has yet to supersede it. However, the dictator Qilsm himself has repeatedly stated that he is glad there are a few ground rules for his independent world of criminals: he'd like for there to be _some_ semblance of order, thank you very much.

Three figures, cloaked and hooded, swiftly moved through the quiet night of the planet. The two taller ones moved almost silently behind the shorter, hunched one that led them to the expansive, well-defended estate of former table-headed-service-drone Bob.

Tall shadowy figure number one looked up at the palatial house. "I don't like this…" He muttered.

The short shadowy figure shot TSF-One a withering glare. "You're not supposed to _like_ it. You're here to make sure we get this guy's support."

TSF-Two sighed. He couldn't believe he was doing this. A week ago, he was at the top of his game, the top of the _Empire_. He had lost everything he had once had, and was now doing favors for his captors. On top of that, he was taking orders from a person smaller than him.

_Way to go,_ His inner voice teased him, _You make it to the top, and end up undermining your own power on behalf of alien lizards._

The shortest member of the group pulled off her hood, and looked warily around. Though she was dressed in a grey, loose-fitting Natrian diplomatic uniform, she was immediately recognizable as Tak. She scanned the huge gardens that must have cost a fortune, purple eyes reflecting the light of the security lamps that lit up the fence like fireflies. She was, undoubtedly, the Irken who had attempted to take Zim's mission a few short months ago.

Yet she was different, in several subtle ways. She appeared to be more content with life: Her mouth no longer pulled down into a perpetual grimace, her eyes were opened wide instead of narrowed in anger, her antennae hung more loosely curled since whatever had happened to her had made life that much more bearable.

She was still Tak, however, and had taken to her new role as she had to her old one. Her people had been the center of her life, and they still were. Only now she was fighting _against_ their Empire.

She extended a gloved hand from her too-big sleeve (The Introi didn't have much experience with making clothes, as they had no concept of modesty by covering up the body: Any clothes they made were simply accessories, pouches, or protection against the fiercer of the elements) and pushed the call button on the large iron gate.

Bob's new place consisted of a massive complex of gardens and lawns surrounding a huge mansion. Every aspect of the Bob residence screamed opulence and wealth to passerby, while the twenty-foot fence and security drones screamed 'Do Not Touch'.

One of those drones flew over to the small group, decelerating to a stop and hovering there impressively. The robot's sleek design pointed to Vortian design, and was as much a floating sculpture as a death machine.

"Can I help you, madam?" It said in a voice so polite, yet so snooty, it almost perfectly captured the American stereotype of what French people sound like.

"We would like to see your master." Tak said, equally politely, but in such perfect Vortian that the robot actually seemed surprised.

"I apologize, madam, I thought I was speaking to a less refined individual. Come this way… Your friends may follow." The security drone said, the snootiness gone.

Tak allowed herself a small smile: This was definitely one of 777's models. The guy was an ardent nationalist, even if he had no nation. He programmed his robots with a bit of Vortian pride, and Tak knew how to play off of it.

With a sigh of defeat, the two tall figures followed Tak into the maze of topiary, slinking behind her almost silently as they passed though the grand marble doors. The entire place was set up like the Imperial Palace on Irk: Tall cylinders, hooked together by access corridors, tipped with enormous spires, all made up of the 'patchwork' style of building that let Irkens recycle metal, but also give their buildings a little charm: The real Imperial Palace, for example, was made almost entirely out of the hull of the _Massive's_ predecessor, the _Big_.

As she walked past the enormous paintings, statues, and intricate chandeliers, Tak began to estimate the wealth of their target: Clearly the report of 1.2 billion was not high enough. Finally they entered a massive, cavernous room, stone floor inlaid with precious gems, and ceiling gilded with art that would have rivaled the Sistine Chapel, if the figures had been humans instead of Irkens, and if the full scope of Irken history displayed there had been less violent. In the middle of the room, the hub of the mansion, was a tall series of steps, leading up to an enormous throne (Yes, a _throne_) upon which sat the unmistakable visage of former table-headed-service-drone Bob. Bob sat there, smiling superiorly down at his guests, fingers steepled over his opulent robes.

"Well, well, well, I have some strange visitors tonight. Is that you Tak? What happened to the implant?"

Tak smiled. "Oh you noticed? I didn't need it any more, and mind control gets kind of creepy after a while."

Bob frowned. "Well, I don't see the logic behind it, but you have a great surgeon: I can't see any scars."

"Rapid epidermal growth. I've got some chemically inclined friends. In fact, that's the reason I'm here."

Bob rolled his eyes, and leaned back in his chair. "Let me guess: You're here to ask for some of my money. It's so hard getting to the top, and when you do, you have to start giving out money to every charity in the worlds. It's getting frustrating. Of course, I'd be happy to lend you a couple million, if you can convince me to. I'm a _lot _richer than you might think."

Tak smiled knowingly. "All that from winning a bet?" She said, not really asking anything. She already knew, but it was a formality.

"Well, I've been doping some investing, loaning a few rising stars money, buying real estate, that sort of thing."

Tak grinned: Time for the coup de grâce. "I suspect less than half of it is legal. But, you have at _least_ 400,567,897,421 monies, and I could use some."

Deathly silence filled the room. Bob's face registered shock for a split second, before it hardened into anger. "I see your friends are in some pretty high places. I wonder if this violates some Imperial privacy rights law."

"Not on Sleazybackalleyia. Besides, all we had to do was look up your file on the _Massive_, Taller Lir's department of Financial Records betting tickets, and some of the people who paid you money in your five weeks here."

Bob nodded his head distractedly, when suddenly something occurred to him. "Hang on," He said, turning around to eye Tak suspiciously, "How did your 'friends' get on the _Massive_?"

"They're from… Out of town."

For the first time in the little meeting, Bob looked scared. "You don't mean the ones who just-" he began, eyes widening in panic.

"Attacked and defeated the _Massive_, liberated Vort and the other Galactic Western provinces, and are now pushing on the borders of planet Callnowia?" Tak said, smiling maliciously as she walked towards Bob, every feat of the Natrians emphasized by a heavy footfall.

Tak may not have had the mind control implant, but she still knew how to twist people's arm, and the entire Empire was in a panic over the disappearance of the _Massive_ and the Tallests. The official story, put out by the Control Brains, was that they were simply campaigning against the invaders. However, many Irkens doubted the story on the levels of their consciousness where they still had full control. An Irken like Bob, cut off from the Control Brains and the Irken media, would probably know most of the story.

"Y-You want me to give the aliens that are destroying the Empire my money?!" He demanded, indignant yet scared.

"Yes. Why do you care if the Empire is destroyed? The Empire didn't treat you very well." Tak said, snapping the last of the feeble loyalty his Pak had unsuccessfully tried to instill in Bob. She could see it on his face: He'd still be worried about dealing with such powerful people, but it was no longer a moral issue.

"Of course," Tak said, acting less intimidating, "I can promise you that my employers will leave you alone. Sleazybackalleyia will be taken, but the Natrians would be happy to give you your own little planet, provided you help them in this hour of need, and that you stay far away from civilized society."

Now Bob was interested: "What do you mean?" He said suspiciously, recovering some of his confidence.

Tak pulled a small object out of her pocket, hit a button, and-

A gigantic, 3-D holographic model of a planet appeared in the middle of the room, displaying a green sphere, dotted with small silvery lakes and craters.

"What is that?" Bob said, looking with interest at the small world.

"It _can_ be Bobotania, if you want. The Introi can terraform it to order: Forests, fields, mountains, and no water. Nothing dangerous either, and all animals will be smaller than you. You will receive an large supply of worker drones to, say, build you a palace, a capital, or whatever. You can get immigrants from any other galactic entity, as long as you're not doing anything hideously amoral. You'll have your own little nation, and full protection from the Natrian Armada. It's quite a step up from mobster to Emperor, wouldn't you say? Think about it: A nice chunk out of a far off galaxy all to yourself."

Bob was very interested. "And how much will this cost me?"

"You'll get it for three hundred billion monies, as well as a little ego boost right now."

Bon looked down from his alluring potential world, and asked, "What will they be doing with all that money?"

"Buy war matériel, ships, all that stuff. Its more than the entire Imperial treasury, and it would go a long way towards winning the war."

Bob nodded. "And what about the 'ego boost'?"

Tak grinned, "Who are the two people you hate more than anyone else in the universe?"

"… Probably the Tallest, but I don't see-"

With a short sigh, TSF-2 pulled off his hood, revealing the disgusted face of Tallest Red. Purple did the same, and Bob grinned evilly: "Apologize."

The Tallests looked pitifully towards Tak, a _'Do we have to?'_ look written clearly across their faces.

Tak nodded. Red sighed, and pulled a lengthy document out of his robes, reading the humiliating script out loud with Purple, wondering how it had all gone so wrong.

"_To the Magnificent Lord Bob, soon to be ruler of Bobotania, we, the sniveling Tallests, who are nothing but scum compared to he, do apologize for unfairly and unjustly depriving the Magnificent Bob of the money we so wrongly forced him to wager_…"

* * *

It had been a bad day.

Red and purple had stood on a podium, surrounded on all sides by the taller podiums of the Natrian High Council, being tried for crimes against civilized life by the five aliens.

"… Therefore, the High Council herby finds the defendants guilty of mass mind control, attempted genocide, tax evasion, torture, e-waving, and 'Extreme Conga' dancing without a license, among many other crimes that have not been mentioned here today due to the issues of length. All of these crimes are punishable by law with a life sentence in both Irken and Natrian legal systems." Aaila Qyto, a strange yellow fish alien hovering in a sphere of water, read from the sheet. She turned her stalk eyes towards the other members of the Council, and nodded at Scly.

"However, Councilor Evcoth has suggested an alternative punishment."

Scly stood up, and picked out a sheet of paper to read. "The Almighty Tallests, having no Irken ethical system to restrain them, and not knowing of any others (Most likely for a lack in caring), therefore are protected under Natrian Imperial law, Code 16583, passed in 2241 A.F. by High Council Member Myrtyr of… Um… That's complicated… Aw, skip it!" Scly crumpled up the sheet and tossed it over his shoulder frustrated, "I was never good at reading this stuff. The bottom line: You two are protected under the 'Didn't know any better' clause, and we can not give you the full punishment."

Red had looked up at Purple and grinned, before Scly continued: "Therefore, you will serve a life sentence in Maxrarr high-security-"

"Hey, wait!" Red said, floating angrily over to Scly's podium, "You said that we weren't getting the full punishment!"

"Yes," Scly said, leaning over the edge to look down at red, "And it was capital punishment. You got off easy: Ordinarily, in a time of intergalactic war, you'd be considered too dangerous to be left alive."

Purple frowned, "So why _are_ you letting us live?"

"Your such big idiots, we don't think you'd be a threat. Anyways there is an alternative… Community service."

Red looked at Purple, and then at Scly. "What do you mean?"

"You two still have significant standing as leaders of the Irken Empire. You can be our fundraisers: Travel around the galaxy, get monies from rich guys to finance the campaign, and you won't have to rot in jail for the rest of your life. Don't you Irkens live five hundred years? That's a _long_ time."

Red's mouth fell open in anger. "Your threatening_ us_? The Almighty Tallest! You can't do this! We have rights!"

"Yes, well, if you were on Judgementia right now, you'd be getting your full _Irken_ rights. You're on a Introa now, and we don't owe you anything. You will take your orders from the acting leader of the Reformed Irken Empire."

"_Reformed_?"

"Yes. All Irkens currently not under the power of the Control brains have formed a new nation, the 'Reformed' Irken Empire. This includes pretty much everyone at the last battle, and no, they're not going to listen to you. They elected their own new leader, and personally, I think she's great."

Purple gasped in shock. "_Elected_?! That's completely ridiculous!"

"She'll know just what to fix," Scly continued, not caring about the horror so clearly written on the Tallests faces, "She's been at the bottom, and that's where the flaws really stand out. She wrote up this big plan and everything, and- Oh yeah, by the way, she said she knew you."

Red sputtered angrily, "At the bottom!? The new leader is someone** SHORT!?!**"

"Yeah: Her name's Tak. How do you know her again?"

* * *

Needless to say, the Tallests did not have much fun after that. For the first time in their lives, they were _working_. On top of that, Tak was shorter than them, and everyone seemed to lover her, while giving the Tallests the cold shoulder. The entire new nation lived aboard the _Massive_, and Tak somehow found the time to visit them all. She was a celebrity: People cheered when she entered the room, and when the Tallests came in, everyone got all quiet and stared at them. Irk above, it was awkward.

After a lengthy series of apologies, groveling, long poems dedicated to Bob's glory, and juggling for his enjoyment, they left the mansion with significantly fatter wallets and significantly shredded self-esteem.

"This sucks." Red mumbled as he pulled his hood over his head.

"That's why it's a punishment. Now come on, we're going to Foodcourtia to get Sizz-Lorr's help."

Purple moaned. _Please_, he begged to whatever deity would listen, _Please let Sizz-Lorr forget the whole Enchilada Supreme thing._

* * *

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Dib was in his nightly routine of staring up at the stars, and cursing them.

"Stupid aliens… Coming here and trying to destroy us… Not letting me get the answers to the math homework…" Dib mumbled, kicking at a few pebbles next to the back porch. His life was getting worse all the time: He would spend all evening chasing after Zim with a camera to get one shot where his wig was a little loose, and the Swollen Eyeball Network thought that his antennae was an 'interesting hairstyle'. Then his dad tried to get him into therapy again, Gaz beat him up for throwing out the cereal that had expired a month ago, and he tripped when he was going up the stairs.

Dib sighed, and debated whether or not to squish an ant. His life could not possibly get any weirder than it was now.

Suddenly, a sharp sonic boom caused by the pressure wave of a forty-foot turtle materializing in the back yard slammed into Dib, and sent him flying into the wall.

The turtle blinked and slowly looked around the yard, hovering above the ground, and making a sound similar to a jet engine dying down. Dib sat up and gaped at the turtle, as thumping noises from the shell revealed activity inside. Suddenly, one of the roughly octagonal shapes in the shell of the turtle (A fine example of _Chelonia tempus_) lifted up like a hatch, letting a shaft of white light spill out into the yard. A strange, weary, shell-shocked looking man stuck his head out, gulped in a lungful of air, and began speaking rapidly in what sounded like Sanskrit.

Dib groaned, and massaged his temples. "What is it _now_?"

* * *

Muahahahahahaha! A cliffhanger!

Who's inside the turtle? What is the turtle? What'll happen to the ants? I don't know yet!

Anyways, sorry I updated a week late. I'll try not to do it next time.


	10. A bad day

"_The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."_

-Unknown.

* * *

Vem's day had not gone as planned.

First of all, they _did_ make it to London, but Lir stormed out of there after a half an hour, saying that the accents were driving him crazy. Things improved when they toured Paris for an hour, even if Vem fell in the Seine, and Lir couldn't stop laughing for half an hour. Then Lir found out how seriously the French took their food, and spent the visit to Notre Dame gorged on pastries. The visit to Rome was okay, even if the Coliseum turned out to not be the best place to try and land a invisible spaceship, and Greece was great. Vem asked the guide questions about how the Parthenon was built for an hour, and Lir tripped on the front steps.

Then things got a little weirder. Lir said he wanted to see Japan.

"No, Lir." Vem said as she got back on the ship.

"Why not?" Lir complained as he used his new human legs to walk up the ramp.

"I'm not going to another stupid human country. The big thing made out of marble was a little interesting, but now I'm bored. We're going back to the base."

"Fine. I'll drop you off there, and _then_ got to Japan."

"No, Lir, you have to come back too."

"Why?"

"Because I said so."

"No, seriously, why?"

"Lir, I'm not going to repeat myself!"

"Come on, Vem…"

"Did you even hear what I just said!" Vem said, throwing up her arms, "I'm not going to repeat myself! I'm your superior commander!"

"Yeah, by like, half a centimeter." Lir said, rolling his eyes.

"Well that's a half a centimeter more than you!"

"I guess you're right… Using my authority as a Taller, I hereby make it illegal for Taller Vem to order Taller Lir around."

Vem's mouth hung open in shock. "You little weasel! You can't do that!"

"Actually… I can."

"I'll just repeal it!"

"Using my authority as a Taller, I hereby make it illegal for Taller Vem to repeal any laws made by Taller Lir, or change them or their effects in any way."

Vem's eyes narrowed in fury. "You-You can't just take advantage of the Irken legal system!"

"I should've done this a long time ago!" Lir said happily, sliding into his seat.

"You _worm! Slime! _Stop messing with the bureaucracy!"

"Yeesh, you're almost as mad as the time I stole your credit card…"

"You did _what_!?"

"Naw, I was just trying to get you even more worked up."

Vem's face darkened to a deep green, and she advanced towards Lir, ready to wrap her fingers around his throat.

Lir just smiled, still seated in the pilot's chair. "Before you do that Vem, you might want to consider something important."

"What?" Vem asked in a tone that suggested its owner should be in a mental institution.

"While I distracted you by getting you angry, I flew the ship twenty thousand feet into the air. We're halfway to Japan already, and you don't know how to fly this thing."

Vem looked out the window to see that they were indeed over the clouds, screamed, and spent the rest of the trip hitting herself in the head with the yellow pages.

* * *

Tenn's day had not gone as planned.

Skool had been a bit of a let-down (Nowhere near as bad as Zim had made it out to be), and when she had gotten back down into the base, she couldn't find anyone.

Tenn marched frustratedly down the hallways of the new parts of the base. Every once in a while she would stick her head into a nearly-vacant mess hall, and ask the few occupants where the others were. They usually told her that they didn't know, or that they were in the upper parts of the base.

Eventually, Tenn managed to get an officer to tell her that the off-duty soldiers had gone over to the labs to see what Zim was doing there.

"Crap! Zim specifically ordered them to stay out of those rooms!" Tenn yelled after the officer gave her the details.

"Where is Zim, anyways?" The officer said before sipping on his soda.

"Upstairs… I think I might have broken his brain…"

The officer just shrugged, and went back to his argument over whether you should eat human food if you ran out of rations with a private.

Things were not much better in the labs: The soldiers ran around, laughing and messing with equipment, picking things up and putting them back in the wrong places, and some of them had broken the eternally-euphoric 'Nick' human out of his containment tube and were watching him juggle fruit.

"You, stop trying to eat the squid! No, it does not still have a human brain in it! Zim fixed that guy a month ago!" Tenn called to various Irkens who were messing around getting some of them to stop what they were doing, others to just go to another experiment, "No, don't push that! Yes, there is a problem: What if that was a self-destruct lever or something? Okay, yes, Zim would probably put the self-destruct in an obvious place marked by big letters, but you don't know for sure, and- Hey! What did I just tell you about pouring soda in there! Would you all behave? We're _guests _here, and you can't just go around destroying his stuff!"

"Uh, Tenn?" Skoodge asked, suddenly appearing at her side.

"Look, Skoodge, I'm kind of busy right now-DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT, PAL!-so just hurry up with whatever it is you're asking, before-WAAAAAALLLLK!-something bad happens." Tenn said, trying to carry on the conversation while managing the crowd.

"Well, um, my air vent turned out to have a lot more room than the other soldiers' rooms, and I had an idea to entertain people." Skoodge began.

"Why didn't you just ask the Tallers?" Tenn yelled over the din, catching a particularly bad misbehaving soldier by the collar.

"They're still gone, and the other guys kind of-"

"Yes, yes, you have my permission. I gotta get everyone out of here."

Meanwhile, back in the living room, Zim stood stuck, trying to come up with a witty comeback for Tenn, and failing miserably.

Eventually, GIR wandered into the room, sipping on a chocolate SuckMonkey. He sat down on the couch, and began to suck on the drink so hard it pulled his face inwards. The slurping noises got Zim's attention, and he looked down at GIR.

"GIR! Get off the couch: The SuckMonkey will leave a stain!"

"Okee-dokee!" GIR squealed, jumping off the couch and spilling his entire drink on the cushions.

The Invader, in typical Zim fashion, ignored the spill and Tenn's point, and instead walked towards the fridge, intending to get a drink a head down below to see how things were going.

About a minute later, the Irken Armada came rushing out of Zim's labs, followed closely by the screaming Irken, who somehow had gotten a pipe and was swinging it over his head.

"I THOUGHT I TOLD YOU TO STAY _OUT_!" He screamed, almost taking off someone's head.

Tenn, who had been standing in a doorway farther down the hall, watched Zim chase them all out, then turn around and lock the door, stalking off and grumbling things like 'I can't even trust them Irkens to not touch my stuff… Look what they did to the mayonnaise!'

Tenn sighed, and looked down at her Fleet Commander uniform. They were houseguests for the craziest lunatic in the Irken Empire, the Tallers were flying around the world and had left her in charge, half the Armada was gone, the Tallests might be dead for all she knew, and her soldiers were more interested with playing with Zim's stuff than fixing the spaceship.

"It's not _that_ bad." The computer said in a bad attempt to be comforting.

And now a hunk of machinery was pitying her. She had hit rock bottom.

It was time for some potato chips.

* * *

Dib's day had not gone as planned.

Immediately after the turtle had popped into his yard, the man had ran inside, and grabbed a Tupperware bowl to throw up in, after that, a more normal looking woman, probably Greek, had come in and had started yelling at him in Sanskrit. They had calmed down, and after the man, dark-skinned and black haired, probably from India, had figured out he spoke English and had established what year it was, pocketed a dollar from the woman and said they would explain everything in the living room.

He brought in a soda and a lemonade for the two strange people who had come out of the turtle in his backyard. It most certainly was a turtle, albeit a gigantic cyborg one, and Dib was pretty sure it had eaten one of the rose bushes.

"So… Um… Who the heck are you people?" Dib asked a little bluntly, staring at the strangely dressed people before him.

The man on the right looked up from the bowl he had thrown up in recently. "I'm Raj Bihar, and this is the horrible demon monster who drinks all my coffee-" Here he gestured towards the woman sitting next to him, who hit him on the head with a magazine, "-I mean Helen. We're time-travelers! Oooooooh!" He felt sick again, and bent back over his bowl.

Dib blinked. Out of all the strange things in his life, this was _way_ up there. Probably worse than the whole 'Chickenfoot' thing.

"Please ignore him," Helen said, rolling her eyes, "I think he's a bit punch-drunk right now."

"Uh-huh…" Dib said, glancing at the turtle again, "And you're time travelers?" Helen nodded. "And you come from the future? In a turtle?"

"Actually, the past," Raj said, regaining some of his composure. "I'm from Patna, or where it will be, about… two-thousand years ago now?"

Helen mulled it over. "… three-thousand."

"Right, and Helen is from Athens, about 500 B.C."

Dib blinked, mentally debating whether or not to call the police.

"Oh, no, we're not crazy," Raj said with a grin, "After all, we _did _show up in a time-traveling turtle."

Dib frowned. "Okay, you _do_ have a point, but how do I know it's a time-traveling one?"

Raj dug around in the pocket of his strange clothes, and pulled out a 2050 quarter for Puerto Rico. Dib looked at it for a second, decided it was genuine, and looked up at them in shock.

"Why did you come here? Why was now so important?"

Helen rolled her eyes. "Raj was being an idiot again, and tried to see how far in the future he could get in one second, starting at 1 A.D."

Raj grinned. "Who's the bigger idiot: The idiot, or the idiot who says 'Yes' when the other idiot proposes?"

Helen hit him upside the head with the magazine again, but she smiled a bit, and Dib saw her adjust her ring.

Dib sat down in the armchair and massaged his temples. "Let me get this straight: I'm having a conversation with Raj and Helen Bihar, time travelers from ancient India and Greece, respectively, who traveled through time in an enormous turtle, as part of a race?"

Raj coughed. "Uh… yeah, that's about it."

Dib sighed. "I'm not going to even try today… I'm going crazy."

"No you're not!" Raj said in an attempt to be friendly, "Besides, I've known lots of crazy people, and they're not all bad. I'm even married to one!" Here Helen hit him with the magazine again.

Dib sighed. "So… What's with the clothes? They from the future?" He said, pointing at the loose-fitting dark green cotton robes Raj wore.

"Actually, those come from back home. I go back there every few weeks, and mom always insists on giving me something new to wear."

Dib nodded. "Okay… Wait, if you're from the _past_, where did the turtle come from?"

"Good question: I don't know. I was out and about one day, down by the river, when I accidentally fell down a cave. You can imagine what was down there."

Story of his life," Helen said with a sigh, "Sees a giant cyborg turtle with a hatch built into its shell at the bottom of a mine shaft, and he goes inside."

"Well, hey, it's not like it belonged to anybody," Raj said defensively, "It told me so. Besides, I was stuck down there, and the turtle did seem interesting."

Dib frowned. "You just _found_ a time-traveling turtle-ship at the bottom of a mine shaft in one thousand B.C.?"

"Pretty much."

"… What do you do with it?"

"Well, I'm on a big tour of time: See the great Empires of the world, the most beautiful places in history, that really good restaurant back in Timbuktu where they still accepted rupees."

"Mostly he just messes around with his giant turtle." Helen said flatly.

"Pretty much." Raj said again with a shrug.

"… So why are you still here?" Dib said, shooting the turtle a quick glare as it tried to eat a tree.

"Now, that's what I call bad manners." Raj said, rolling his eyes, "Asking why your guests haven't left yet."

"You nearly gave me a heart attack when your turtle materialized on my lawn."

"Touché… Well, we're here because the turtle's still fixing itself, and something big is gonna happen in this year."

"What's going to happen?"

"Well, for starters-" Here he was interrupted by a vicious elbow to the side from Helen, who began to rapidly yell at him in their strange language. Raj started talking back, and soon they were entirely ignoring the befuddled Dib.

Eventually Raj lost the argument, and turned back towards Dib. "… Apparently I can't tell you. You'll probably know it when it happens."

"Okay," Dib said, thinking the Irkens probably had something to do with it, "But, wait, why don't you go around preventing the great tragedies of history? Like the _Titanic_?"

Raj shook his head. "You can't change history. You just can't: I don't mean it in the 'No one knows what will happen!' ethical reason for it, I mean you literally can't change history. That's why I don't go to far into the future: If the time right now became the past of some other time, I wouldn't be able to change it, even if something bad happened to me. Understand?"

"Not at all."

"Okay, you know Schrödinger's cat? He made up this theory that if you put a cat in a sealed box, with no way of knowing what was going on inside, next to a vial of poison that had a fifty percent chance of breaking and killing the cat, then the cat would exist in a halfway, undefined state where it was neither alive nor dead. The cat would stay like this, until you opened the box and observed what was going on inside. Then it would become alive or dead. Of course, it's just a metaphorical way of explaining an aspect of particle physics, but it has bearing on what is going on here: What if I look in the future, and end up learning that there's an aspect of history that I can't change, whether I like it or not. Get it now?"

"No. The cat would be alive or dead, and you just wouldn't know. It would have been dead the entire time, whether you looked or not. Just like history would always turn out that way, whether you knew it in advance or not."

"See, _that's _what I told Schrödinger, and he just rolled his eyes. Think of it as reading the big unmasking part of a detective novel. The rest of the book just isn't fun anymore."

"Okay, I think I understand… But then what are you doing here then?"

"My first trip took me to 2885. I decided that was my upper limit."

"Okay… So why can't you alter history?"

"Well, it just works that way. Suppose you were trying to go and stop the _Titanic_ from sinking: You'd probably show up too late, or come out of the time stream too late and slam into an iceberg, which pushed it fast enough to slam into the _Titanic_. Then you're sitting in your giant turtle wishing you hadn't done that, feeling like a guy who kicks a pebble and starts an avalanche."

"Ah."

"Yes. That doesn't mean that I can't interfere with time at all: Suppose every person from the _Titanic_ was teleported to the planet of happy bunnies. Would that violate history?"

Dib nodded.

"Not necessarily. The point of altering history is that the _future_ remains unchanged. In the future, average schoolboy Dib grew up knowing that the _Titanic_ was a horrible disaster, that everyone left on board drowned. Or at least _thinking_ that."

Realization dawned on Dib. "You mean, that as long as nobody from the parts of the future that you knew about acted any different, then anything could have happened?"

"Yes. If I destroyed a civilization of super intelligent grapefruit from the beginning of time, it would be fine as long as no one knew about them, or at least didn't act on the knowledge in any way to affect the things I know for sure from my experiences throughout history. It's not that there's a rulebook, it's just that history, all of time, has a set course. It doesn't mean that we have no free will, it just means that history, whatever it _really _is, is settled. It can't happen a different way."

"Wow… That's scary. The philosophical implications are enour-" Dib began.

Gaz's s loud voice thundered down from upstairs: "WOULD WHOEVER IS DOWN THERE SHUT UP ABOUT TIME TRAVEL! YOU'RE DRIVING ME CRAZY!"

Raj looked up in fear to the source of the noise. Helen yawned. "Yeah, no offense honey, but when you try to explain the intricacies of time travel to people, it gets kind of annoying."

Raj sighed. "Yeah, okay. Well, we're going back to the turtle for the night. We're probably going to be staying here for a few months, to see the big historical event. That okay?"

"Yeah! This is great!" Dib said in excitement.

Raj nodded, and he and Helen left. As Dib got ready to go to bed, his mind swirled with the possibilities of time travel, until the specifics of what Raj had said caught him.

Stay _here_?


	11. Oddities and fights

_On monday we settle this like children!"_

-Zim, _The Wettening_

* * *

Ms. Bitters was having a rough day.

It wasn't that Dib and Zim were fighting again: They _always_ did that, and it actually got pretty entertaining on dull days. It wasn't that the class was ignoring her, off in their own little worlds and not paying any attention to the lecture. It gave her more time to say her favorite word: "Doom, doom, doom, doom", ad nauseam. It wasn't even the horribly cheery light of the sun peeking through the glass, as she'd learned to deal with that long ago.

It was that infernal girl asking so many darn questions!

"The Western Front was the primary area for trench warfare, which-" Tenn's hand shot up, making the elderly teacher sigh, "-Yes, Tenn?"

Bitters listened to her question about the invasion of the Low Countries, silently pleading with the girl to shut up. In her mind, she was much more blunt, and she inwardly begged the girl to sit down and be quiet, while she remained stony on the outside.

Why was that girl so interested in military tactics? There was nothing Bitters enjoyed more than a healthy appetite for carnage and death, but this girl was just _weird_.

For starters, she seemed interested with everything: She took immaculate notes that Ms. Bitters had been forced to give an A (She gagged when she remembered that), she seemed to remember everything discussed in class, and the horrors of war Bitters made a point of reinforcing daily didn't even make her flinch.

Ms. Bitters answered her question, trying very hard to let her loathing of small children fill her voice as she described the effects of chemical weaponry. Tenn hunched back over her notebook, tongue sticking a little in concentration as she drew diagrams. Deep in the recesses of her dark mind, Ms. Bitters cursed the principal for sending her the student from Hell.

Dib noticed the strange fascination Tenn had for earthly military, but he knew the reason for it and wasn't nearly as creeped out. Though he was a bit thankful that Ms. Bitters's attention was focused on Tenn as opposed to him, he rolled his eyes every time Tenn took in a new battle strategy. _Leave it to an Irken to find something worthwhile in History class_, He thought, balancing his pencil on his finger.

Zim knew Tenn's reasons even more than Dib, and he was even less interested. Tenn would often dig out her notebook at tactical meetings back at the base, and bring up some human battle to see if they could use it against the invaders. Zim didn't care about those stupid meetings at all, and usually left early to get something to eat. After all, who needs tactics and strategy when you have the amazing ZIM to help you destroy stuff?

And so, they sat in Skool, none of them knowing how fast events were progressing in the wider universe. If they did, maybe they would have done something to prepare, but then again, ignorance is bliss.

* * *

Meanwhile, Lir and Vem were back in the city, out having a walk through the eternally congested streets.

"I still say it was a dumb idea." Vem grumbled, pulling a more-than-tipsy Lir behind her, "Getting in that drinking contest was stupid. I don't care if we won free French fries for a year, you could have slipped up."

"Oh, shut up, hic," Lir slurred as he followed close behind Vem, dangerously tottering from side to side, "It wash jusht a little, hic, competition… Nobody got, hic, hurt or shomething."

Vem rolled her eyes. Leave it to Lir to be the first alien to discover the wonderful effects of Earthly alcohol.

Not far down the street, Raj and Helen were out for a walk in some new 21st century clothes, enjoying the sights of a relatively modern city.

"Oh, isn't that sweet honey, the bank hasn't exploded yet!" Helen said, pointing at one of the more iconic towers on the skyline.

"Think we should buy all the postcards from the gift shop before the French Fry incident? They'll be worth a lot of money…"

"We don't need it. Besides, let's just be grateful no one got hurt, and that _you_ didn't have anything to do with it."

Perhaps it was Fate that made the four people meet. Perhaps it was dumb luck. Perhaps God has a sense of humor.

All we can know for sure is that Lir suddenly belched, and Raj thought it was funny.

"Lir, be quiet!" Vem said, glaring at Lir, eyes occasionally flitting up to the strange man a few feet down the street who was badly attempting to stop laughing, "You're gonna get us noticed!"

"Who caresh?" Lir said, stumbling a bit, obviously very drunk, "Nobody caresh… What would they do? Hey, you," He said, jabbing a finger out at the Bihars, "You know I'm an alien? From outer space! Woooooooooo!"

Vem massaged her temples as Lir made 'spooky' noises from beyond the stars. Helen shot Raj a 'don't interact' look, which, as usual, he ignored. "That's great! You got your visa? I hear the government's cracking down on illegal aliens."

"What?" Lir said with frown, "We're _illegal_? Oh, that'sh great! Vem, why are we againsht the law? What did I do?"

Vem groaned. She turned towards the human couple and apologized for Lir. "I'm sorry, he's drunk." She said in a monotone, "He keeps telling everyone we're aliens."

"Becaushe we _are_!" Lir butted in, "I can show them the bashe! We're aliensh, by the way."

Raj grinned, ignoring another look from Helen. "That's fine. We're time travelers! We came from the past in a cyborg turtle."

Helen shot Raj an even worse look, not wanting to appear rude, Vem groaned a little, knowing this would set Lir off, and Lir grinned in naïve smile. "Really? That'sh aweshome! It'sh even more coll than thish 'Guinessh' shtuff the bartender shold me! Can I drive?"

Raj, unfazed by Lir's ever-worsening lisp, smiled cheerily and said, "Oh, sorry, I wouldn't want a drunk driver running my ship. You might crash into a telephone pole or something."

Lir frowned. "Drunk? Whatsh drunk?"

Raj cast a nervous glance back at Helen, who shrugged. Most drunk people Raj had known had either admitted that they were drunk or denied it, but he'd never actually met someone who claimed to not know what drunk meant.

"Uh… When you have to much beer, you get all klutzy and you start talking with a lisp…" Raj began uneasily.

"I'm drunk?" Lir said, genuine confusion written plainly on his face.

"Yes."

"_I'm_ not being weird or anything: Everyone'sh being sho sherioush."

"Well, alcohol intoxication tends to disrupt our better judgment." Raj said, backing up slowly from the seemingly-crazy man, using long words to confuse him.

"Vem, what'd he shay?" Lir mumbled, looking up at the disguised taller.

"Okay, well, that's very nice, but we should be- Wait a minute, _Vem_?" Raj said, suddenly remembering something that had been nagging him since he had heard Lir call her 'Vem'.

"Um, it's foreign!" Vem said, pulling Lir away from Raj, who was eyeing them suspiciously.

"_Really_ foreign," Raj said, nodding as the specifics came back to him, "Didn't it originate in the Tezcali region of the Greater Equatorial desert on Irk?"

Vem froze. In her mind, thought whirled around her head in disarray, trying to figure out how he knew that, trying to figure out what to do, trying to figure out how to communicate the danger to Lir, and countless other trains of thought that all got jumbled up in a big mess, only resulting in her mouth falling open.

Raj grinned. "You really _are_ aliens, aren't you?"

Again Vem couldn't say anything. Lir nodded cheerily.

Helen and Raj exchanged glances, and broke down laughing. Helen recovered first, and in between giggles said, "Tat's okay: _We're _really time travelers."

* * *

After Skool, Zim walked with Tenn to the corner, running over the details of the lesson Zim had fallen asleep in.

"So they _still_ think it's impossible to divide by zero? Idiots." Zim said, rolling his eyes.

"Oh, come on Zim, there are a lot of idiots in the universe," She said, rounding a corner, "It's amazing how often people do stupid stuff."

"Like fail to mention that the planet is covered in water?" Dib's voice called out, coming from somewhere in the trees up ahead.

Zim immediately panicked, backing up against the wall that bordered the property behind them, scanning the limbs of the trees for his nemesis. Tenn was just confused.

"Zim, what's water? I haven't learned that one yet." She said with a frown, looking for what scared Zim so much.

"It's H2O in chemical terms. I probably should have told you to bathe in paste." He said hurriedly, sweating nervously as he grabbed Tenn's hand and pulled her out from the overhanging boughs where Dib could be hiding.

"_That_ stuff? Yeesh, that's bad! I took a chemistry course at the Academy on it: It actually _dissolves_ you molecularly. Where'd Dib get it on a planet like this?" Tenn said, looking up at the trees with renewed fear.

"There's a lot of it lying around on this place. Human bodies are made of it." Zim said, clear panic in his voice.

"How much water?" Tenn said suspiciously, eyeing Zim angrily.

"You know those blue things you saw from space?"

"The oceans?"

"Yeah. They're basically a bunch of liquid water and salt."

Tenn yelped in horror, and sprinted for the corner. She had been expecting a few painful drops of a uncommon fluid, though much more common than on Irk, as part of a childish prank. But if the planet was _covered_ in the stuff, then he could get a hold of dangerous amounts.

She rounded the corner, and had a half a second to register that Dib was standing there with a small yellow plastic-looking object, before deadly cold acid smacked her in the face.

She stood there in shock as she felt the water begin to eat away at her skin, then screamed, and dropped to the ground as she began to smoke.

Dib laughed. "Serves you right, alien scum! Next time, I'd think twice before invading a planet. Just a little hello from planet Earth. Oh, don't worry, I've got lots of water balloons left."

Zim stood there in shock as Dib began to laugh, and Tenn rubbed her face with grass, spitting out the horrible stuff. For the second time, his negligence and stupidity had ended up hurting Tenn.

His hands curled into fists. She was _his_ commander, on _his_ planet, and as far as he was concerned, the last orders of the Tallests still meant he had to get her back to Irk safely.

Dib was oblivious to the sudden fury that possessed Zim, and laughed over his squirming opponent. He wondered if he could convince Ms. Bitters to take them to the aquarium or the beach for their next field trip. This was a nice moment of triumph: He'd have to write it down in the Notebook of Victory.

Just as he turned to leave, Zim's fist connected solidly with the side of his head. He was knocked clear into the street, and landed painfully on his backside.

Dib looked up in astonishment as Zim extended his PAK legs, rising up on two and aiming the other two at Dib's head.

"YOU LITTLE WORM!" He yelled, advancing threateningly towards his downed opponent, "DIRT-MONKEY! I'M GONNA KILL YOU!"

Zim jumped on Dib with a feral battle cry, and the two rolled around on the street, exchanging blows.

"WEASEL!" Zim yelled, "You don't attack an unarmed opponent like that! Even by your own human standards that was low!"

"The guy who's trying to enslave me entire species through deception and conquest is telling me how to _fight fair_? That's a load of crap!" Dib hollered back, kicking Zim in the side.

"This fight is between you and me!" Zim snarled, twisting Dib's arm viciously.

"No, this fight is between you and the human race! Tenn's trying to destroy us too!"

"Not _actively_!"

"She's helping you isn't she? Besides, my enemy's friend is my enemy!"

Tenn spat out the dirt in her mouth, satisfied that she had gotten all the water off, and stood up to watch the brawl. She looked down and saw that Zim's wig got pulled off, and Dib was pulling on his antennae.

With a groan, she extended her PAK legs from her better-disguised 'backpack', and pulled the two of them apart.

"Zim! Stop being such an idiot! He's just a human, and it wasn't a lot of water!" she snapped, tossing the wig at Zim's chest. He caught it, and carefully adjusted it, before going back to struggling to rip Dib's throat out.

"And as for you," She said, rounding on Dib, "I thought I told you not to mess with the Irken Empire!"

Dib smiled thinly, and spat out some blood. "How superior is the alien species that can't handle some water?"

Tenn turned back to Zim. "He's got a point: Why didn't you warn me?"

"I forgot!" Zim whined.

"Aren't your brains computers or something?" Dib cut in.

"Stay out of it," Tenn said, "And Zim, this is kind of one of those need-to-know things. I'm letting Dib go because he's the only one keeping us sharp."

Above Zim's protests, she let Dib go, and shot him a look that said 'Watch out for next round.'

Dib grinned, then shot a triumphant look at Zim. Tenn waited until he was gone before letting Zim go.

"You can't just maul him like that in public." She said, "People will notice."

Zim mumbled something about pig-smellies, and started the long limp home.

* * *

"So, do you mind explaining why you know what we are?" Vem asked, arms crossed in front of her as Raj used a 'borrowed' set of keys to get into the house.

Helen was currently holding up Lir and explaining that what he was in was called a hangover. Lir had a bottle of water in his mouth and was looking like he had just realized that human life wasn't perfect.

"All in good time." Raj said with a smile as the door clicked open, and they entered the darkened house.

Vem stared at the empty room and turned towards Raj. "A suburban human home? Very interesting." She said sarcastically.

"No, it's much more interesting than the house," Helen said with a smile, "It's the backyard!"

Raj opened the back door and led them out, to see the turtle taking a nap. Vem just froze again, her mental and emotional gears shifting rapidly. Yet again she was at a complete loss for words, and was now of the opinion that if they ever did conquer this planet, she'd just give it to Lir. It was too weird.

"This is our time-traveling turtle!" Raj said proudly, walking up and petting its enormous head.

"Very impressive," Lir said, more in a bad mood than anything else.

"Hey! Don't be mean to the cyborg turtle!" Helen snapped overly-dramatically.

"He didn't mean it," Raj said soothingly as the turtle shifted a little, "Are you my favorite time-traveling turtle? Yes you are! Yes you are you good turtle you!"

The turtle yawned a bit, and the hatch in its shell opened up. Raj and Helen proudly led the other two into the spacious body of their turtle.

Inside was even weirder than outside: The upper third of the turtle was a gleaming white, futuristic control room, with an impressive display of buttons and computer monitors. The other two-thirds made up Raj and Helen's 'house': A long wall separated the living room, decorated with often-clashing Indian and Greek objects, from the rest of the ship, with one door less entrance with a little stone plaque saying '_Domus dulce domus_' (A thank-you present from the former governor of Pompey for evacuating the city and leaving plaster casts of the citizens with some fake bones and stuff) above the opening. Lir saw doors leading off of the central room, to the bathrooms, kitchen and bedrooms, as well as little windows that either displayed an actual view of the outside, or a scene from some other location throughout history.

"As for why I knew Vem's name was Irken, it was the first thing I saw when I came in on the ship: 'Most popular Irken baby names for 2885.' I guess whoever had the turtle before us left it there. Guess he had a reason."

Lir looked at the control panel with interest. "You mean this thing can actually travel through time?"

"Anywhere or any-when. I haven't gone off earth yet: There's still too much to do."

Vem frowned. "How'd you get this turtle?"

"Long story. How about we discuss over a cup of coffee? How about Cuzco, honey?" Raj said, turning towards Helen, "I always liked the place. 1435?"

"Sure."

"Wait," Vem said, moving forward in fear, "You're not actually going to take us time traveling?"

"Don't worry: You only get sick the first time, and we don't leave behind burning tire tracks or anything."

Before Vem could stop him, Raj hit a button, and they were gone.

* * *

Sorry this was a little late. I had a lot of stuff going on.

Two corrections I'm making: Number one, for those of who who didn't notice before, I'm changing one of the categories to 'Romance'. There are a lot of couples in this, but they only start becoming important now.

I also moved Raj's home from 4000 to 1000 B.C., for cultural references in later chapters.


	12. Skoodge's

"_The story so far:_

_In the beginning the Universe was created._

_This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."_

-Douglas Adams, _The Restaurant at the End of the Universe_

* * *

Planet Callnowia marched on, making and delivering packages to all the paying customers of the Empire, trying to avoid the ominous warnings of invasion that threatened the planet from all sides.

Callnowia was distinguished from the similarly-purposed Screwheadia because it specialized in sending people all those TV products they need _so _much, while Screwheadia handles average mail. Deep in the interiors of the planet, great forges liquefied metal in seconds, and pumped the reddish broth down to the factories where Irken metal smiths worked ceaselessly. An important consequence of Callnowia's primarily Invader market was that the products there were too important to be made by ordinary Irken slaves. Until recently, slave species made the goods: If they screwed up, then you apologized to the Invader, sent him a replacement, and make the slave work double-time to make up for it. Of course, after the disastrous consequences of the Megadoomer incident, the Irkens decided it was too important for untrustworthy hands, and replaced them with normal Irkens.

However, it was here, on the edge of the Empire, where so many Irkens were crowded into so little space under such horrible conditions, that the revolutions began.

The instigator? An ordinary worker drone, putting together 'germ-sensing' micro goggles for paranoid Invaders.

His name is not important, and he requested it not be made public knowledge anyways. It is not important where he came from, what happened to him, or whether or not he messed up on a pair of micro goggles.

What _is _important is that one day, while on his rounds, the supervisor noticed one Irken was sitting rigidly still, and that the others near him were occasionally casting nervous glances at him.

The supervisor frowned. He almost never had to get hiss workers to get working again: He was mostly there in case of accidents.

"Up and at 'em, worker." He said, thinking that it would make the worker stop taking a break and let him get on with his life.

The worker did not start making the goggles again, but instead swiveled in his chair to face his boss. "I haven't been working for three hours, and you just noticed _now_."

The supervisor frowned. "Yeah, well, I guess I'll have to write you up for that. Get back to work."

The little worker glared at his superior, and said, coldly, "Am I so unimportant I would only have to look busy when you came around, but do anything else the rest of the time? Why work at all?"

The supervisor felt the stares from the other workers drilling into his back. This was bad: The sounds of clanking machinery and moving conveyor belts still filled the high-roofed room, but he no longer heard the clicking of the goggles being assembled.

"You have to do your duty, son," The supervisor said, not breaking eye contact, "You do love the Empire, don't you?"

Ordinarily, that would have been enough. The worker would have nodded dutifully and gone back to work, but this one glared at him even worse. "Does the Empire love _me_?" He said darkly.

This was _really_ bad: He could hear the others whispering among themselves, and the little worker was trembling with hatred.

"We have to do our duty, son." The official said, nervously backing away from the angry stare.

Suddenly the worker couldn't take it any more. Something inside him snapped, and he yelled furiously at the supervisor, his shouts echoing across the factory floor.

"WHY?!" He snapped, "Why do I slave away day in and day out, putting together useless junk for the Invaders, when my life hasn't gotten any better? Why!? So the Irken Empire can expand to new planets? Why should I care?! Because Irken universal domination is a _good thing_? Says who!? All my life I've been told that it would be a great day when the Irken Empire rules the universe, but how do I _know_ it will be? According to the government, it will be, but according to the Vortians, it won't! Why should I listen to the Control Brains? Why should I listen to the _Tallests_? Why should I slave away every day, for nothing!? When have _I_ ever gotten anything out of the so-called 'Glorious Irken Empire'? The Irken Empire has doubled in size twice over in my lifetime, and I've never gotten anything out of it! WHY!?"

The murmuring in the room rose to an uproar. The supervisor backed up appalled: This was worse than defective talk, this was _treason_! This was mutiny! This was rebellion! This was…

"ABSOLUTELY RIGHT!" The supervisor yelled, snapping his clipboard in two, determined never to kiss up to another bureaucrat as long as he lived.

The group smashed the machinery, with the same battle cry of 'WHY!?' spreading from group to group as entire sections of the planet revolted. They were Irken without a cause, Irkens without rule, Irkens without ambition.

They were Irkens without a Control Brain.

* * *

Back when the _Massive_ had first been taken, Scly had taken a tour of their new vessel.

Irkens were streaming out by the thousands, ready to go under the same PAK operation that Tak had undergone. Granted, they were asleep at the time, and being carted out by Natrian death robots, but it still made Scly proud.

He stood in one of the red-walled corridors, scrunched to one wall to avoid one of the robots, when a new lieutenant walked up and saluted.

Scly nodded, and halfheartedly saluted the officer. "Found them yet?" He asked in a bored tone. He already knew.

"No sir," The officer said, "We haven't found one of the Control Brains yet. Where can twelve alien robots be hiding?"

Scly rolled his eyes. "Watch and learn," He said, walking to the other side of the corridor.

Scly took a moment to examine the janitor's closet set into the wall, before grabbing the door handle and jerking it open violently. No less than eight of the Control Brains were crammed in the room, stuffed between each other, the walls, and various mops. The one closest to the door still had a tentacle outstretched to the knob, in the same position it had been in since he had hid and held the door shut in the first place.

Scly frowned a bit, and looked around the room, while the Control Brains still were stuck in their immobile, shocked positions. "Where's the rest of you?" He asked, arching an eyebrow.

At that moment, the vent above them groaned, and bowed inwards, splitting in half and dumping the remaining four on the rest of the Control Brains. They were quiet for a while before the one closest to the door spoke up in an awed electronic warble, "How'd you find us?"

"Simple," Scly said, rolling his eyes, "All the doors in this section of the ship were made by the same manufacturer: You can tell by the codes here," Scly pointed at a series of numbers built into the plastic-like synthetic that made up the door, "And all the doors in this section were made by the same machine, which was a little bit faulty. If you look at the other doors, they don't exactly match the frame, and pop out of it a little when they're closed. You must've thought there was something wrong with your door when it didn't close, and the guy in front here pulled it shut. No other door was pulled shut that tightly, and I figured there must be something _holding_ it like that."

One of the Control Brains who had fallen out of the vent turned to the others and whispered, "This guy's _good_."

Scly opened up the door even further, revealing the several highly armed security drones he had programmed to stand near the door. As the Control Brains filed out of the room with their tentacles above their heads, the lieutenant whistled.

"Sir, that was brilliant." He said as the Control Brains filed down the hallway to one of the prongs leading to the _Victory_.

"I know: It was a big 'Sherlock Holmes' moment." Scly said with a grin.

The lieutenant frowned. "A what?"

Scly sighed, wishing there were more people who knew about Earth literature. "It's fine. Besides, I just got out a metal detector and scanned the hallways closest to the Control Brain rooms."

* * *

The Control Brains on the _Massive_ were used to manage data from the rest of the Armada, help with the networking and development of recently conquered worlds, and use their omnipresent influence over Irken PAKs to keep the soldiers and worker drones happy and productive. After the Natrians captured the _Massive_, the main set of twenty Control Brains back on Irk had to work double-time to reinforce PAK control in the Empire, and in the end, several outer-ring systems were completely out from under their control.

On these planets, such as on Conventia, the Irken populace became increasingly dissatisfied with their life, and began to ask the 'Why?' question that had started on Callnowia. This represented the second stage in the Natrian war effort: Most frontier systems were so disillusioned with Imperial tyranny that they revolted and were conquered practically without a fight.

* * *

Meanwhile, hundreds of years ago, the four time travelers were sitting in the Imperial Palace of Cuzco, ancient capital of the Incan Empire. The ancient civilization, built in the great peaks and valleys of the Andean mountain range of South America, stretched from North to South an area equal in size to what the Thirteen Colonies of North America would someday be. In the heart of the bustling, high-altitude capital, servants, scribes, and countless others hurriedly walked to their various jobs, and tried to ignore the strange people sitting in the kitchen, who somehow had the permission of the Emperor himself to be there.

"So," Vem said, looking up from a native dish she had refused to touch, "You just _found_ a time-traveling turtle?"

"Yep." Raj said before taking a sip of his drink.

"I don't know how history's managed to last this long with him at the reins, but it seems to be working out okay." Helen said, before showing Lir very clearly what he could and could not eat.

Lir finished part of his meal (Heavily over spiced, per his orders), and looked up at Raj curiously. "Where can you go in that thing?"

"Pretty much anywhere," Raj said, emptying a drink (Which he was 85% sure was water), "And any when, but it displays error messages if you try to go back more than thirteen billion years."

Vem arched an eyebrow. "And you use it for…?"

"I guess you'd say 'nothing', but we can't do anything really big. No making myself king of the world or anything." Raj said with a shrug.

"Why not?" Vem asked with a frown.

Raj was about to answer, but Helen stuck a hand over his mouth. "_Please_ don't use the Schrödinger thing again. I'm already getting a headache."

"Oh, that's just the altitude," Raj said with a cheery smile, "The air's too thin up here. The people here have bigger lungs, and twice as much hemoglobin."

It was Lir's turn to frown. "Hemo-what?"

Raj opened his mouth to answer, but Helen grabbed a empty dish and held it above his head. "You try and explain human biology to aliens, and I will _kill_ you."

"Are all human marriages like this?" Lir asked.

Raj turned to Helen, who turned to face him. They burst out laughing.

"No, she wasn't _actually_ threatening to kill me, she was just joking." Raj said before chuckling.

"It's how most human relationships work: We act like we hate each other, but I've never hit him over the head… Too hard." Helen said wrapping an arm around Raj's shoulder.

"How does that work, exactly?" Vem said, leaning forward.

"What?" Raj asked.

"The whole… 'Marriage' thing."

Raj and Helen exchanged glances, and sighed. "We'll have to this conversation somewhere else… Like where we can _breathe_ maybe?"

Raj nodded, and they stood up and led the aliens back to the turtle.

Hundreds of years later, archeologists were very surprised to find enormous carvings of people walking into a gigantic turtle, thousands of feet above sea level.

* * *

Hundreds of years later, Zim walked into his toilet with an cold-pack on his head.

The following sentence makes a lot more sense when you take into account the fact that Zim had just been in a fight, and that his toilet was actually an elevator into the under levels of an alien base.

Still, it's pretty confusing to see a small green person with a non-water icepack climb into his toilet, and flush.

Zim sunk below the surface of the Earth, watching the rather boring view of worms, dirt, and rock pass by outside the pink-tinted plastic walls. Today had been rough, and he was looking forward to a relaxing evening in the command center, with peace and quiet. Peeling off his contacts and taking off his wig, Zim stepped out into the surprisingly empty lab level of the base.

He looked around, and his one eye not swelling up narrowed suspiciously. Where was everybody? There were thousands of Irkens in the base, and they had all disappeared again.

Zim made a beeline to the labs, determined not to let them screw around with his stuff again. Halfway there, however, he heard a loud thumping noise coming from under his feet. Zim looked at the ground in confusion: They were in the bottom level of the base. How could the noise be coming from _below_ him, in solid bedrock?

Zim followed the thumping into one of the secondary labs, the thudding becoming progressively louder. He could feel the vibrations reverberating across his antennae, and the sound kept growing. Zim pushed open the door to another room, and the noise became extremely loud. Zim scanned the room, looking for the source, and noticing that the grate to Skoodge's air vent was slightly ajar. He walked up to it, and also realized he had neglected to notice the enormous neon sign saying '_Skoodge's_' in big glowing red letters.

Zim slunk down into the vent, and found that the space too small to stand up in had suddenly acquired a fancy rd carpet, and expensive-looking potted plants. He followed the path of the vent as it went deeper into the earth at an incline, wondering where Skoodge had gotten such fancy overhead lights. Finally, the vent leveled out into a spacious room (With, mercifully, a ten-foot ceiling), with two doors leading off on both sides into larger rooms, the contents of which Zim could only guess. Posters that looked like the belonged in a theater or opera-house were encased in glass in the well-lit lobby, and what appeared to be closed movie-

theater concession stands were set in between the doors on each wall. At the end of the room was a large wooden door with a gold star painted on it, Skoodge's name inscribed upon that in flowing letters.

Zim gaped open-mouthed at the room, no longer paying attention to the thudding, when he heard a cough coming from his right. He turned, and saw that the bottom-right doorway had an Irken dressed like a bouncer standing next to the doors. From inside, Zim could hear the thudding noise, now identifiable as music.

The bouncer waited for him to do something before sighing, and saying: "Sorry pal, the cinema, gym, and restaurant are all closed. We just opened."

Zim shut his mouth and stared at the burly Irken, who looked like he could knock him out in an instant. For some strange reason, he was wearing sunglasses indoors, hundreds of feet below the surface of the Earth. "Who are you?"

"Just the bouncer," The black-suited Irken said, "Skoodge hired me to look after the new joint. I was a guard on the _Massive_, so I guess this couldn't be too different."

Zim was dumbfounded. Where had Skoodge come up with the money for all of this? Why was there some club built in his air vent? Why didn't Skoodge tell him?

He asked the bouncer as much, and he arched an eyebrow. "What do you mean _you're_ air vent? Besides, Skoodge told everyone at lunch that we were- Oh, you're _Zim_ right? You'll have to get to him inside: He's seeing over the big opening."

Zim rolled his eyes, and marched furiously into the room, determined to give Skoodge a good tongue-lashing. Immediately after he got inside, his mouth fell open in shock as he saw half the Irkens in the base crammed in a huge room that appeared to be based off of a human nightclub. Expensive beverages were being sold in small booths to the sides of the door, and off in the distance Zim could see some band playing heavy-metal music up on a stage. Multicolored lights flashed from the ceiling, and the din of the crowd drowned out everything but the music.

Zim stared at the imposing wall of Irkens before a rowdy group of partygoers engulfed him and swept him into the center of the throng. Zim, disoriented and gasping for air, looked for some landmark to help him navigate to the door. Since every Irken in the room was taller than he, he could barely see anything, and decided to head for the wall. Navigating the massive throng of Irkens, diving under arms, getting elbowed mercilessly, and running into someone's PAK at least a dozen times, he burst out of the crowd and grabbed a table for dear life, only to see-

"Hiya, Zim!"

Skoodge in an expensive suit, sitting next to a little sign marked 'Comments'. In front of him were dozens of pens and pieces of paper, as well as a suggestion box that was stuffed with paper.

Zim stared at Skoodge, who grinned cheerily back, for the better part of thirty seconds. Finally, Zim let go of the table, drew himself composedly up to his full height, and screamed:

"WHAT IN THE NAME OF IMMORTAL IRK'S FIRES IS GOING ON!?!?"

"Oh, we're having the opening party," Skoodge said nonchalantly, "Isn't it great? Everyone loves the club! Everyone else are taking naps in their rooms to recover. The Computer even got out in a robot body and he's dancing out in the crowd!"

"Who told you that you could do this?!"

"The Tallers were gone, so I asked Tenn, and she said yes."

Zim spasmed a little in fury, and then continued. "Where did you get all this space?" He demanded harshly.

"Don't you remember when everyone was moving in? That big fight we had? Afterwards, you said that I wasn't getting a room, but I could have the entire vent. Turns out, this was a big ventilation system that ended up being redundant, and the computer never finished it. These rooms used to be cooling fans."

Zim was about to respond, when he suddenly heard an all-too familiar squeal ring out from the crowd. Her suddenly remembered that GIR had been going without supervision for over twenty-four hours.

Flooded with adrenaline, he plunged back into the fray, praying that GIR hadn't gotten to the peanut butter again.


	13. Dinner and a show

"_Yes, I think the Irken Empire is completely redeemable. Vio, in one of his wiser moves, messed with the Irken genome as little as possible: The genes for Irken reproductive organs and Squooch glands are still there, with only one or two critical letters missing. In the case of the genitals, the genes are completely unaltered, but the gene that lets them be read by the mRNA is changed. The changes to the Squooch gland, though greater, are still minimal, and only consist of the original cell not producing enough Na-3Cl-5 stem cells. Fixing the genetic code would be simple, and we'd only have to do it for the first generation. With that in mind, we should also be glad Vio felt it unnecessary to change the structure of the Irken brain. Modern Irkens are fully capable of the range of emotions that are blocked out today, a fact that we can use to our advantage in trying to get parents for the critical first restored generation. Modern Irkens, I feel, can be easily re-acquainted with the ideas of romance, marriage, and even parenting."_

-Scly Evcoth, speaking to the Natrian Senate on the possibility of an Irken cultural reformation.

* * *

Raj and Helen sat at the table in the back of the turtle, enjoying a nice, relatively normal dinner as the currents of Time itself swirled past the window. Raj was enjoying a curry that no sane tourist would dare touch, and Helen had already finished her dinner and was enjoying a bowl of ice cream.

Raj frowned as he slurped at the curry. He got up and walked back into the kitchen. A few seconds later, he asked, "Honey?"

Helen looked up. "What is it, Raj?"

His answer wafted over from the spice cabinet accompanied with the clink of small glass bottles. "I don't think the turmeric is still good."

"What's the expiration date?"

"May eleventh, 2016. What is it now?"

Helen glanced up at a timeline readout next to the normal clock (Set to the time Raj had first left Patna). "June eight, 1564... No, now it's October second, 1298... No, now it's July seventh 954... No, now it's-"

"Okay, okay, I get it." Raj said with a sigh as he threw out the bottle. Making sure food wasn't expired was always a problem when you lived in a time-traveling turtle, "I'll ask my mom for some more when we get back to India."

Helen rolled her eyes. Raj visited his family back in Patna every month or so, and she never felt really comfortable with his extensive family. Though they went back to Greece whenever she wanted, she rarely had a good reason, and the in-laws all seemed to be too energetic about hearing everything that had happened to them in excruciating detail. Still, family was family, and she could live with the Bihars even if all the little kids (mostly Raj's nephews and nieces) kept running into the turtle and getting it all dirty and Raj's mother kept giving her critical looks.

Raj came back in the room with a thick history book, which the couple consulted more often as an atlas than anything. The _Complete History of the Earth _(2885 edition) was as close to an accurate history of the world as it was possible for people who still thought that Pericles died of plague (Raj's fault, and also how he met Helen. Pericles actually died of old age in the Bahamas in 1385), or that the Suez canal did not involve giant mole people (Helen's fault, and also why you can still find little bits of dirt stuck in the turtle's shell).

"Here it is!" Raj said, pointing at a page with a large Irken Imperial symbol next to a block of text, "It looks like we were only a few weeks early… Whoa, so _that's_ what happens… I knew there was something big."

Helen took the book, looked at the chapter title, and whistled. "Yeesh, I thought that was for a decade or two. Oh, well… Want some ice cream?"

"Sure," Raj said, grabbing a bowl and starting the long futile struggle to scrape some off the side of the carton, "I wonder what Vem and Lir are doing at that base right now."

"You mean what they _will_ be doing in 2500 years?" Helen said, glancing back up at the readouts.

Raj rolled his eyes, and went back to scraping, hoping Vem got a quiet evening. He knew enough about her to say she was done with a day of loud noises.

* * *

"WE GOT A CLUB!? AWESOME!" Lir yelled as he stood in the door. Vem gaped at the swaying crowd and pounding music. She had finally gotten back into her own body, and convinced Lir to do the same, when they noticed a glowing neon sign over the air vent.

Needless to say, Vem's day was going from bad to worse.

Lir looked around the room with wonder, and plunged headfirst into the crowd. Vem considered staying where she was and not getting involved, but her determination to bring back Lir alive won out, and she followed his bobbing head into a sea of shorter Irkens. Lir moved surprisingly fast through the thick crowd, and Vem soon lost him in the confusion of jumping Irkens and pounding music. She decided to do a full-circle scan of the room, when suddenly a particularly intoxicated partygoer slammed into her side, and she fell like a tree.

She tried to get back up, but immediately a group of Irkens swarmed into the space she was occupying and she got wedged between the thick group and the wall. Vem groaned in frustration, tried to straighten up, and bumped into someone's arm, spilling their drink all over her.

Eventually, she settled down against the wall and decided to let the currents of the crowd carry her where they would.

Meanwhile, Lir, not knowing of Vem's stranding out in the crowd, was weaving his way up to the stage where the band was playing. As he wormed his way closer to the speakers, he noticed the crowd seemed to be getting even thicker around a certain spot. Lir turned up his hover belt and floated horizontally over the shorter Irkens to get a look at what they were crowding around.

He was pleasantly surprised to see Zim trying to pin GIR to the floor, while the little robot (half out of his doggy costume and covered in some sticky brownish substance) was screaming something that sounded vaguely like: "PEANUT BUTTER JELLY! PEANUT BUTTER JELLY!"

Lir laughed and watched as Zim struggled desperately to hold down the psychopathic robot, and failing miserably. GIR belted out something about a baseball bat as Zim tried to get a headlock on the deranged machine. GIR, being a robot, was completely unfazed as Zim tried to pull a full-nelson on him. When the little robot got lifted into the air he started pumping his little legs like mad, sending globs of peanut butter into the crowd. Lir laughed at this too, until one of the lumps of peanutty goodness hit him in the mouth and sent him flying back a few feet.

Skoodge was doing his best to keep the crowd under control, but there seemed to be nothing he could do to get them to stop partying. He could convince the people closest to his little table to quiet down, but then they would be swept towards another part of the room by the strange currents that formed in the crowd. The Irkens closest to the drink booths would all rush up to get something, creating an open space behind them that the perpetually pressured crowd moved in to fill. Then, the Irkens at the drink stand would by their drink and move over to the nacho stand, then up to the stage to hear the music, then to the other nacho stand on the other side of the room, then down to Skoodge's comment booth, and then back past the doors to the drinks. This current made a complete circuit every two hours or so counter-clockwise around the edges of the room. A smaller current existed in the center, where Irkens close to the stage would hurt their hearing, and move in another cycle to the middle of the room. The two points where the currents intersected often saw Irkens getting swept up one way or another, and Irkens were constantly dropping in and out of the room. It was an interesting dynamic, but Skoodge was sick of telling a group of Irkens to be quiet that he had talked to a few hours ago.

Skoodge sighed as another round of the loudest talkers came near his table again, and massaged his forehead. He knew it wouldn't be easy, but they had already gone through half the bands that had offered to play, and the drink booths were running out of things to sell (you can't 'water-down' Irken drinks).

So when he learned that the restaurant was finally open, he grabbed a microphone and happily announced over the speakers that it was now five thirty, and Skoodge's Grill and Bar was now open. The huge crowd promptly thinned out, and soon only four people were left, besides Skoodge. Lir was still a little dizzy from whatever strange dancing he had been doing, Vem was huddled against the wall trembling from an overdose to nightclub exposure, and Zim still had GIR pinned to the ground.

* * *

Tenn had taken longer to find Skoodge's, as she had 'important tactical planning' to do on the second floor.

That is to say she was playing videogames.

"Die, alien scum." She growled at her pixilated opponents, chuckling when she realized the irony of the comment. She looked around her little room, one of the only with a view of the outside, and realized that the base was suspiciously quiet. She opened up her door, and noticed that _all _of the commanders had suddenly disappeared. She looked toward one of the Computer's sensors, and quickly asked him where everyone was.

"Oh, hey Tenn. They're down at Skoodge's club in the air vent, and I think one of the Tallers need psychological help." He responded.

Tenn arched an eyebrow. "Of all the answers I expected to that question, that one is definitely near the bottom of the list."

The Computer would have shrugged if it had shoulders. "Don't look at me: You're the one who said Skoodge could build it. I was down there until I got a little crowded by all the other people. Now I'm just watching reruns of _Hogan's Heroes_. Wanna watch?"

Tenn frowned and shook her head. The Computer sighed, and mumbled "Didn't think so…" to himself.

Tenn rode an elevator down to the bottom level of the base, and quickly discovered Skoodge's club. As she hunched over and crawled through the Hollywood-style air vent, the only thing she could think was '_Zim's gonna be mad about this…_'

She got out into the lobby, and was immediately swept into the huge crowd of Irkens moving from the nightclub to the restaurant. She found herself in a large, expensive looking restaurant, modeled after a fancy human Italian restaurant. Irkens were flooding in, quickly sitting at tables with friends or complete strangers, happy to partake in the wonders of the human world. The menus were full of Irken, alien, and 'Local' foods (non-water versions of typical Earth cuisine), and even included a dehydrated wine list. Tenn gaped at all this, and then turned towards Skoodge, remembering that the neon sign. She made a beeline around the circular tables and authentic copies of human and Irken art, over to where Skoodge was standing.

Skoodge was having a pleasant evening, overseeing the extremely pleased crowd that now had something to spend their monies on. The Irken government did not openly take the money of the Irken populace, but instead let them spend it during the short breaks between shifts at their workplace, at the extremely limited number of state-owned shops and eateries. Thus, Irkens could amass a huge amount of money in their lifetimes, which the Empire quickly collected at their death, modern Irkens having no heirs to pass anything on to, or any friends more important than their glorious Empire.

Skoodge felt the swell of pride that comes when re-introducing entrepreneurism to a society, when Tenn grabbed him by the collar, and pulled him up to her height.

"Skoodge," She said, well aware that the short Irken was hanging above the ground and how intimidating that was, "What the hell is going on?"

Skoodge grinned, unfazed at the threatening way she was glaring at him and explained. "Remember that thing I wanted to tell you about yesterday? This is it! Something to keep the off-duty Irkens out of trouble, and help bring in the monies for me."

"Skoodge, we are fighting a _war_ here." Tenn said, letting him down but still glaring, "This does not seem to be a very aggressive tactic."

Skoodge continued to smile, and continued to explain. "Half the crew can't work on repair, and the Computer can't add anything new onto the base for them to work. Even then, we have three shifts of technicians, and what do you think they want to do in their spare time. I'm actually _helping_ the Empire!"

Tenn remained stony. "Your eight-hundred monies suit helps the Empire?"

"Yes. I happen to think I look very suave: When I _look_ good, I _feel_ good, and when I _feel _good, I _work_ good."

Tenn's eye twitched. "It's 'work _better_'… Oh well," She said with a sigh, "I guess it wouldn't hurt to see what this was all about."

Skoodge grinned widely, and thumped her on the back. "That's the spirit! I'll find you a table…"

Skoodge led her through the crowd, and finally found an empty table: Zim's. Every other table was full, and some had decided to move extra chairs to those tables to avoid the fuming little Irken. Lir and Vem were sitting at a table with some of their friends, and Zim was the only other person here, besides Skoodge, that she knew remotely.

"You mind if I sit here?" She asked, and Zim nodded. His entire head hurt, and he didn't feel very conversational.

Tenn picked up the menu, and looked down the list of items. Silence rang in her antennae as she felt Zim's unhappy glare burn a hole through the table. Finally, trying to make conversation, she asked him how the mooshminky was.

Zim groaned. "Don't remind me…" He said as he massaged his temples, desperately trying to forget something.

"What?"

"It was after Operation Impending Doom I… The Tallests sent me to Foodcourtia for a temporary special assignment…" Here Tenn bit her lip to stop from laughing, the specifics of Zim's exile coming back to her, "My boss _sucked_, let me tell you, but I held out: After all, it _was_ my patriotic duty. I AM ZIM!" He yelled, throwing his arms up in the air, though not leaping to his feet like usual. Again, Tenn had to bite her lip to stop herself from laughing at his weary arrogance.

"Anyways, I left for the great Assigning, and a few months later ol' Sizz-Lorr bursts through the ceiling of the Skool and kidnaps me. He had this crazy idea I was banished to Foodcourtia, and that I ran away. Well,, the idiot said he got stuck on Foodcourtia during the Great Foodening, and was there for twenty years."

Tenn would have reminded Zim that the Great Assigning wasn't twenty years ago, but was still trying not to laugh and ended up just arching an eyebrow.

"Yeah, there was a time-warp involved or something. Anyways, he takes me back to Foodcourtia and makes me do my old job, and he has this Vortian energy-shield up that'll make me explode if I go out the door. So I'm stuck there for a week, and I have to escape before the Great Foodening begins. Eventually, I come up with a brilliant plan to escape: The shield projector won't recognize me if I'm covered in too much organic matter. I hide myself in a really fat customer's mooshminky, he eats me, and I pop out his stomach when he walks out the door. Pretty brilliant, huh?" Zim said, shortly before realizing Tenn was trembling violently.

She finally fell out of her chair screaming hysterically with laughter, and ordered the mooshminky just to annoy him.


	14. Wartime and the home front

"_The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one can not eternally live in a cradle."_

-Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky

* * *

Scly looked out at the stars, thinking.

It was something he usually did, especially in space: No clouds or atmosphere to mar his view, no city lights to outshine the far-distant suns, no annoying brother-in-law to bug him for money. It helped him think and it reminded him of his place in the universe.

Which was very, _very_ small.

The mental challenge for today was where several thousand Irkens, a sizeable chunk of the Imperial Armada, had disappeared to.

Callnowia had just been 'taken' (for lack of a better word), Foodcourtia was being closely monitored for signs of resistance, and they had completely walled in all other Irken colonies this far out.

Scly gazed at the stars, and noticed a familiar looking far-off smudge. He frowned, and leaned closer. _What was that one again? _He asked himself as the _Victory _slowly rotated to face a particularly troublesome Irken planet. Even when the firing started he kept an eye on the familiar smudge.

It wasn't a star, and it was too bright for a nebula… Ah, yes, that was the Andromeda galaxy! Scly smiled as he turned to pour himself the Introi equivalent of coffee. Yes, he remembered that: They were going to scan it for intelligent life in their first explorations of this sector, back before they even knew the Irkens existed. They had been getting close when they had suddenly picked up transmissions coming from the Milky Way.

Scly frowned again. Now that he thought about it, it was probably an Irken transmission from Zim's base… He had left Earth alone in its little stalemate because of the bigger problem of the war, mostly because he felt Dib had the situation under control for the time being, but life was proving to be very unpredictable.

He looked out at the Natrian Armada, or at least all of it that could be seen from the port-side window halfway down the ship's length. The original ships of the fleet, built in the sleek, uniform Introi style, were now supplemented by several hundred new ships donated by the Resisty, which had begun assembling a new army on Vort and other liberated planets. Scly had tried to be even-handed while managing the war, dividing up former Irken territory between the three new powers in the area: All former planets in the Vortian Federation were being turned over to the Resisty, while the more developed Imperial planets were given to the Reformed Irken Empire. Smaller settlements and military outposts were reserved for Natrian colonization after the war, though certain planets had been difficult to negotiate with Tak about.

Scly groaned loudly: He was a scientist, not a general, and he was an even worse politician. Which raised the question of how he got elected, but he didn't want to think about that until his final term in office.

And now the problem of Earth. Natrian law dictated that pre-spaceflight planets were to be left on their own to develop, unless something serious threatened their existence, but there was an Irken invasion going on (albeit a very ineffectual, stalemated one). Still, it was a ripe prize in the starry void of space, and with the major intergalactic powers stretched as they were, it was important to keep tabs on these things.

He walked into the fleet command room, and, ignoring the surprise and protests of technicians, selected roughly a fifth of all ships in the Armada and put them under their own separate fleet. He quickly typed in 'Earth recon.' as the title, and began walking towards the shuttle bay, off to spend a few days monitoring the planet. None of the technicians in there had the authority to override his decisions, and the other High Council members usually left him to his own devices.

"Uh… Scly?"

Usually.

"What is it, Reku?" Scly said turning towards the enormous green bird behind him.

"Um, it's just that you sort of sectioned off a big chunk of the fleet and said you were going to Earth… That's kind of weird. We're fighting a war right now."

"Yeah, well, there's sort of an invasion going on there at the moment, so I thought I'd check up on things."

"Oh."

Scly grinned. "Wanna come with? You'll love Earth: They have this stuff-"

"What? Come to Earth? I can't snap! I wouldn't be able to participate or anything!" Reku said indignantly waving his wings and then one of his clawed legs in the air for effect.

Scly frowned. "Why would you have to- Wait, out of the big pile of human cultural stuff I gave you for research, how many things did you look at?"

Reku coughed nervously. "…One. I didn't think I could take any more."

"And which one was it?"

"The first one on top."

"No, what was the title?"

"_West Side Story_."

Scly looked at Reku's naïve stare, and then burst out laughing.

"Oh, God," Scly said between fits of laughter, "You think the entire planet is like that movie?", Here he had to stop to bite his lip, "And they all go around snapping, and wearing 50s style clothes-"

This was too much for the esteemed alien intellectual, and he collapsed on the ground in hysterics, slamming the high-end space age polymers with his fist as he laughed.

Reku decided that Earth sounded like a funny place and tagged along.

Climbing aboard his shuttle about an hour later, recovered from his laughing fit and inwardly wincing whenever some soldier gave him a crisp military salute (Scly had tried a brief stint in the military after graduating, and had left within a week with a renewed respect for the army, and a fresh fear of trumpets and marching music), Scly began to ponder the strange happenings of the war. Scly was smart, something he was usually thankful for, and he was beginning to think that there was another force at work in the war besides the Natrian allied and Irken forces. It was like a chess game with more than two players: The problem with the Irken Empire was that you didn't know how many pawns the other side had, but not even knowing if there was another team was even worse.

He poured another cup of coffee as his fleet accelerated towards Earth.

* * *

Scly couldn't know that his theory of a third faction was true, but then again, the Meekrob like to keep a low profile.

Meekrobian Admiral Metao glared at the little dots on the galactic holodisplay, an implied frown firmly entrenched in his non-existent lips as they veered away towards planet Delta, one of a series of planet Meekrob had inspected for invasion and use in the war, and the one finally selected. Its inhabitants called it 'Earth'.

It was perfect, really: Six and a half billion 'fleshies' (as the Meekrob liked to call them), with the technological sophistication of a thimble and all the unity and strength of a cockfight. It was a weak, divided planet, yet one with so much raw potential it made Metao make little squeaking noises with delight. Humans, like all fleshies, used brains to think, and Meekrob, as beings of energy, could manipulate the electromagnetic impulses between neurons to gain control. One Meekrob might be able to take complete command over every muscle in a human's body, but even if there was only one Meekrob for every thousand it was still possible to control their minds, to a startling degree. A thousand human slaves for just one Meekrob, and they could command half the planet.

But now the stupid Natrians had to come and ruin everything…

The Natrian incursion against the Irken Empire was at once timely, confusing, and threatening. Sure it had saved them from getting blown up by the _Massive_, but the top Meekrob researchers were still completely confused as to where they had actually come from. They seemed to use a kind of faster-than-light propulsion that was completely unheard of over in this galaxy, and if there was one thing the Meekrob hated, it was not knowing something. Even worse than that, these alien newcomers seemed only interested in fighting the war for _ethical_ reasons, meaning that they were taking apart the Irken power structure the Meekrob had planned to exploit. One day, Metao vowed, every fleshy in the universe would be under Meekrob's control. But until then, something had to be done about the Natrians.

He turned to a lesser-ranked Meekrob, and ordered him to accelerate their plans on Earth. He turned back to the screen, and watched more of his units leave Meekrob territory and head for the Milky Way. It was an opening move in the final part of the chess game, that he knew…

* * *

Professor Membrane was even more ignorant of galactic events than Scly, but he was conducting a series of experiments that would change human life forever. He was working on the same project the Lemaxans, Introi, Irkens and Vortians had in their time, the defeat of light speed and the removal of humanity's shackle to its blue-green marble. This would change everything, this would bring a golden age to Earth, this would be his greatest triumph…

So he was having a little trouble figuring out why Dib wasn't paying any attention.

"But son," The professor exclaimed, trademark lab coat covered with the little stains that show up when you've been wearing the same clothes for three days without sleep, "This is for science!"

Dib rolled his eyes and continued to ignore his father's pleading, opening the fridge to get a soda.

"Look, son," Membrane tried again, bending down under the open freezer door as Dib rummaged for ice cream, "I know that your scientific interests are… _Different _than mine, but this is big! You have to come with me to the unveiling, everyone's going to be there, and I want you to meet- Are you even listening to me?"

Dib sipped on his soda between scoops of ice cream, planning to spend the night gorging on comfort food. The fact that he had gotten in such a big fight with Zim and then had been stopped by Tenn like that… It wasn't a particularly good day. On top of that, Tenn was a girl. Granted, she was an alien insect girl who had over a hundred years of military training from a species planning to rule the universe, but she was a girl nonetheless, and his ego was bruised as it was.

So now, when his father was asking him to go out in public and stand by while he unveiled yet another piece of stupid science that had kept him away for a month, Dib was less than ecstatic.

"Son, there are more important things than whatever it was you wanted to do. Forget about the Swollen Enchilada Network or whatever it is, and get ready to go. This is one of the most important moments of our lives here! Are you listening to me?" He repeated.

That convinced Dib to respond. Dib whirled on his father, and jabbed him in the gut with the sticky spoon. "Why should I listen to you, when you never listen to me?!"

Membrane was now in a position to apologize and possibly make up with his son, but he went and characteristically made it worse. "Son, this is _real_ science, not some silly paranormal garbage! This is _important_!"

This was the final straw. Gaz, well aware that Dib was experiencing all the wonderful emotional effects of puberty, slunk deeper into the corner where she was playing her Gameslave.

"IMPORTANT!?" Dib snapped, "IMPORTANT!? SAYS WHO? I'VE BEEN SPENDING THE LAST SIX MONTHS TRYING TO STOP AN ALIEN MONSTER, AND YOU'RE TELLING ME THAT SOME LITTLE PIECE OF SCIENCE IS _**IMPORTANT**_!?"

Membrane stuttered in shock, withdrawing every time Dib emphasized the word 'important' with a vicious stab with the spoon.

"Oh, you think it's all okay to spend the entire year away from home, and then barge in here to have us come with you so we can look like a happy family up there for all the cameras, and sit still while you show everyone your 'important' discoveries!"

Membrane gaped at his son. No one had ever talked like that to him. Well, except for his wife, but that was after he had crashed the car.

"I'm going upstairs to work on my 'silly' science, and you go have fun at the big unveiling. 'Travel to the stars'… The stars are where all my problems came from!" Dib spat, mocking the motto for the light speed project in a fairly good impression of the television announcer's voice, before storming upstairs and slamming the door behind him.

Membrane's mouth hung open, rippling the lab coat around his chin slightly, as for the first time he considered that Dib actually _believed_ he was dealing with aliens.

He looked down at Gaz, who was wearing some expensive yet somehow scary dress. "Ready to go?' She said, eyes never leaving the screen.

Membrane looked back up at the stairs, and had a brief mental struggle between family and career. Career won, as usual, and he left the house a few minutes later, not hearing Dib light a blowtorch to make his next anti-Irken weapon.

* * *

Zim sat in his chair, his bad mood improved somewhat by a belly full of Vort dogs, retelling more of his 'great exploits' for Tenn.

"No, no, I'm serious!" Zim said, leaning forward to go into details at the sight of Tenn's disbelief, "He grabbed Skoodge by the collar, and started whacking him in the thing's face! I still don't know what happened to the sergeant, and I'm pretty sure my battle tanks got lost in the mail or something."

Tenn laughed, and shook her head. "Got any more stories, 'Fearless Invader'?"

Zim frowned suspiciously. "If I didn't know better, I'd say that was sarcasm, Tenn… But yes, I do. Like, this one time, I created a _brilliant plan_ to destroy humanity but the Tallests wouldn't come to see it!"

Tenn bit her lip to stop another chuckle as Zim used the deep 'Zim voice' for his brilliant plan.

"I genetically-engineered a brain parasite to crawl across the surface, with the natural ability and instincts to crack open a human skull and suck out the brain and cranial fluids," Zim went on, as if this was normal dinner conversation, "And I must say, I was proud of it. Of course, how could I not be when it was made by the Zimmy hands of ZIM!"

Tenn arched and eyebrow. "'Zimmy'?"

"Yes. It is an adjective which means 'To be like or belong to Zim'. Synomynous with awesome, incredible, and mighty. It's right there in the _Invader Zim revised Dictionary of the Irken Language_. Didn't you read it?"

Tenn had to bite her lip again, remembering the infamous, shoddily put-together dictionary Zim had attempted to sell, along with his autobiography _I, Zim _and the documentary _Invader Zim: A lifetime of accomplishment_.

"Anyways," Zim went on, ignoring how people at the nearby tables were craning over to listen and get a good laugh, "I ask the Tallests to come over and witness the downfall of humanity-I even made sandwiches- But they said they were busy and were being attacked or something. Now, I knew the Tallests would realize how wrong they were when my plan came to fruition, so I devised an ingenious remote command-chair to take over the _Massive_'scontrols. It was going perfectly until _Dib _showed up and started messing around."

Tenn blinked. She had been fairly uncomfortable with the idea of Zim taking remote command of the _Massive _(she could see why the Tallests had covered that one up), but when you threw _Dib_ into the mix, you had to get worried that Zim was dangerous.

"So he and I are fighting over the control of the _Massive_, and I tell GIR to go and monitor the parasite's containment levels. But when I have them about halfway to Earth, I hear that the levels are getting unstable. I get up and go into the containment room-"

"You just left Dib in command of the _Massive_?"

"-And I find out that GIR is passed out on the control panel, in mashed potatoes!" He continued, ignoring the question, "I wake him up to start adjusting stuff again, and the computer tells me there's someone at the door, so I tell the roboparents to handle it. I have to run all the way back into the control room and start fighting over the controls again. Then I find out that the roboparents are trying to eat some neighbor boy, and I get GIR to go and work the _Massive_ controls. Thanks to my brilliant negotiating skills, I convinced the neighbors that we were still normal, but the roboparents started getting angry with me. I have to run all the way back to the control room _again_, and I tell GIR to go back and fix the containment levels, but he runs three steps and passes out. Then the roboparents start breaking into the room, and I have to lay down a force field just to keep them out! But, then my brilliant planning comes to fruition, and I discover the location of Dib's spy bug. I get the computer to send a re-activating code to his stole Irken ship, and start chasing him with it. Oh, you should have seen him run… so, I got the _Massive _coming down to Earth right on top of his head, when suddenly it disappears!"

Tenn just gaped at him, and the other Irkens cast each other nervous glances.

"Oh, don't worry: It turns out I took control of a _Resisty_ ship, and they activated their shrinky-self-destruct." He grinned, "Thus, I destroyed a huge part of the Resisty's army just like that! Me! I AM ZIM!"

"So then what happened with the brain parasite?" One of the onlookers asked.

"That? Oh, it escaped into the base and brought a pain unlike any other known form of pain. More Vort dogs, waiter?"

Te Irkens once again exchanged glances, until a tremendous crashing noise reverberated from the far side of the club. Tenn frowned. "Uh, Zim, what did you do with GIR after he started dancing out there?"

"Him? I threw him in the gym. He seemed pretty excited to go in there, so I-" He stopped suddenly, realizing exactly how stupid that was.

"Excuse me," He said, getting up with an irritated expression on his face, "I have to go take care of something."

He marched quickly to the doors, and pushed them open in a hurry.

Ten rolled her eyes. She had a feeling that the entire stay on Earth was going to be like this, but at least Zim wasn't too crazy.

All in all, it had worked out pretty well: They had an advanced base with an unparalleled recreational facility, technicians working around the clock to fix up the fleet, and an military force to defend themselves from any human threat. Things were getting better all the time.

Then again, ignorance _is _bliss.

* * *

Sorry for updating so late: Spring break was a bit hectic and I just wanted to get it up before Easter. After all, I need to prepare: No crazy rabbits are breaking into _my_ house…


	15. The Plot thickens

"_People can have the Model T in any color. So long as it's black."_

-Henry Ford

* * *

_I should have expected this_, Zim thought, widened mouth and eyes narrowing into a scowl, _Everyone's gone crazy_.

The scene before him would have reduced a lesser Irken to stupefied staring for more than ten minutes, but though Zim was by all accounts a lesser Irken, it was his base and he wanted all thins to stop.

Minimoose and GIR were facing each other in the ring, GIR wearing a traditional samurai outfit, Minimoose wearing an oversized version of a samurai's helmet which managed to cover his entire ovoid purple-moosey form (except for his nubby legs, but her had managed to make some convincing and rather cute armor). Both held swords in threatening positions, and a ring of Irkens rimmed the little arena murmuring excitedly. Skoodge was sitting next to a large bronze gong in a saffron colored robe, and for some reason there was an awful lot of peach blossoms floating in the air.

Zim gaped as GIR and Minimoose began speaking to each other annoyingly quickly, their mouths not moving in-synch with their voices for some reason:

"You have dishonored my people, evil one!" GIR said in a surprisingly deep voice, "Prepare for combat!"

"Squeak!" Minimoose responded, lowering his blade in challenge.

"By the honor of my ancestors, I will see my village avenged!"

"Squeak!"

"You leave my mother out of this, scum!"

"_Squeak._"

"Oh-no-you-didn't!" GIR said, snapping his hand in a Z formation for every syllable.

"Squeak!" Minimoose called back.

That was too much for GIR. He raised his blade above his head and charged at Minimoose with a cry of 'DIE!'. Minimoose floated at him at top speed with a cry of 'SQUEAK!', and they collided in the middle of the ring with a clash of sparks, struggling violently to overcome each other.

Zim stared as they began their violent duel to the death, before gazing at the cheering crowd. Irkens whooped, yelled, and called out bets to each other, taking in every ounce of excitement that they apparently couldn't get in war. _So these are the _Irken Elite, he thought to himself, _The most highly trained soldiers of the Empire that dominates the universe? They're acting like idiots!_

Zim's focus shifted back from how undeserving his peers were to the enormous mess taking place in his basement. Skoodge had messed up big time: This fight was taking things too far.

He angrily marched across the room, hands balled into fists, trying and failing to look intimidating (it's hard to look threatening when you're an alien midget from a species of naturally short insects, ducking sword blows from your robotic moose and dog). Zim, scowling in fury, forcefully stomped up to Skoodge, who was sitting next to the gong making ridiculous meditating noises like a very perverted version of a Buddhist monk.

"Skoodge, explain." Zim said darkly, his voice carrying all the malice it could. It was not a request.

"Oh, hey Zim!" Skoodge said, apparently a bad judge of people's emotions, "We're reenacting a scene from _Poke of Doom_, this really cool kung-fu action movie made in Japan eighty years ago! I'm playing the monk," He said, gesturing at his extremely conspicuous robes, "GIR's playing the hero, and Minimoose is the villain. Everyone saw it in the cinema, and they though it's be awesome to have robots act it out. Plus, GIR and Minimoose were just dying to try this out. Pretty neat huh? Oh, here's my line: '_Remember, young grasshopper, boxer who chews on foot get sock in mouth_'."

A colorful range of emotions swept across Zim's face, before he took a deep breath and calmed down. "Skoodge," He said, trying extremely hard not too explode, "Number one, you seem to have trouble understanding that there are limits on what you can do in civilized society. This is absolutely ridiculous, and it needs to stop. Number two, that sounded like a bad perversion of a Confucian quote."

Skoodge arched an eyebrow. "So?"

"Confucius was _Chinese_, not _Japanese_." Zim snapped, then continued before Skoodge could ask him how he knew that, "Number three… _Poke_ of Doom?"

As if on cue, GIR and Minimoose dropped their swords, and began to viciously poke each other as they rolled around the floor. Minimoose made significant headway despite having nubs.

Zim blinked. "Never mind… Just get out _now_."

"Okay, whatever. We were going to start up the dance party anyways." Skoodge said, getting up to his feet and picking up the Styrofoam gong and tucking it under his elbow.

Zim trembled with rage and grabbed Skoodge by the collar, yanking him down three inches to his height.

"Skoodge, you are not going to so much as _breathe _without my permission, do you hear me!" He roared, "This is _my_ base, you're we interfering with _my _mission, and I'm eighty-five percent sure that you're using _my _laser amplifier as a chandelier in the bathroom. This ends _now_."

Skoodge blinked under the tangible weight of Zim's umbrage. "Okay, okay, we'll just set up the music and not do anything else. You don't have to get so worked up over everything."

Exactly two seconds later, diners in the other room were suddenly startled by a loud thudding noise that sounded suspiciously like someone in the gym had been viciously thrown at a wall.

* * *

Thousands of feet above the little scene, arranged around Zim's makeshift space station like seeds on a dandelion, the remaining ships of the Irken Armada were undergoing around-the-clock repairs to get them space worthy enough to make it home again.

At least, they would, if half the repairmen weren't partying down at the base.

Zim's space station was a large, curving, spiky affair, that managed to look quite cool without actually doing anything. Essentially, it was Zim's very large attic capable of spaceflight: A big place to store all the miscellaneous junk that was not deemed worthy to be kept with the 'important' junk on Earth, and a few labs for when the main one was flooded (GIR always used too much toilet paper). It served mainly a structural purpose now, a massive anchor to keep everything together, with the teleporters necessary to get technicians to the base and back.

It was an impressive, if chaotic, sight. Spreading out from the central core, thousand of thin metal piers extended into space, keeping the anchored ships apart so they could be easily worked on. The repair crews would scurry up these catwalks in the vacuum, wearing protective gear when necessary, using the zero gravity to propel themselves in any possible direction to reach their ships. Some of the more important piers, due to heavy traffic, were converted into glass tubes, fully equipped with air and gravity for ease of transport.

The unfortunate Irken we are focusing on was on one of the smaller catwalks, pulling himself through frictionless, gravity-free space by use of the railings and his anchor cable. He grumbled about the pain in his arms while conveniently forgetting that he complained about his legs when he had to walk, as he shuttled himself up to the waiting fighter. He was the only one assigned to this ship, and the damage was pretty severe. One side was melted by radiation bursts sustained in the battle, and the paint was peeling off.

As he lit his oxygen-free blowtorch, he noticed the usual little display of lights that came in from the void: little flashes where micrometeorites impacted on his invisible force-field air helmet, spurts of light that resulted from ultraviolet photons impacting on his retina from the wrong direction, the aurora borealis, and the like. It was for this reason he did not notice the bluish-white blob flit swiftly by down below him, and there was nothing he could have done about it anyways.

He did notice a little sparking in the hull to his immediate left, though, and when he turned to investigate he caught just a glimpse of a Meekrob barreling down towards him at full speed. Before he had a chance to react, the Meekrob passed through his skin and immediately took full control of his neuronal network.

The Meekrob blinked his new eyes, and experimentally wiggled some of the muscles in his new body. He had not built up a familiar memory of the Irken muscle system, and so had to pull at each tendon individually to see what exactly he could move. The Meekrob became aware of a burning sensation in his chest, but assumed that was normal, only realizing he now had to breathe when his vision got all spotty.

The Meekrob, Chejii by name, tried to jump a little. When he saw the results, he moaned: This body was so _heavy_, he couldn't do anything. No more flying around without care, it seemed: Even in zero gravity, the fact that he now had mass sickened him, and he felt queasy when he noticed all the gurgling a body makes. He shivered when he imagined using this lump of fleshy mass in gravity, and then turned his attention to the previous owner of the body, the Irken he had possessed. He pulled off an armored glove, temporarily exposing the hand to the cold, and ejected all the energy from his nervous system. The Irken was essentially flushed out of his body, instantly killing him in the simplest way possible.

Chejii grinned maliciously as he saw the little light flash around his fingers. He pulled back on the glove, and walked purposefully down the metal gangplank with one goal in mind: Eliminate Irken commander Tenn, and bring the Armada remnant to its fleshy little knees. For the glory of Meekrob!

He continued on his march down towards the station where, he knew, there would be teleporters and some industrial equipment just waiting to be used as a weapon. Then he made the mistake of looking up and seeing other Irkens walking upside-down on their walkways no more than three feet above his head.

This, of course, completely destroyed his sense of up and down. He got sick and threw up over the railing.

* * *

Plyn City was a cosmopolitan metropolis in the most literal sense of the word _cosmo_politan. The shining city never slept, because, well, it was a city, but well over a third of its inhabitants were out and about at this late hour, grinning, laughing, and partying under the watchful view of mile-high skyscrapers, some of which actually came up to sea level.

It's probably best to explain the most important factor of Introan geography at this point: In the early days of the Mohara system, when the sun burned hot and bright, Introa was struck directly on the south pole on a meteorite to put the sissy one that destroyed the dinosaurs to shame. It left a crater-a _big_ crater-and caused geological stresses that buckled up the crust, raising mountains and pulling apart incredibly deep chasms in the crust. In fact, the chasms were not a mile deep (they averaged about 1.262355), but the Introi still took pride in their not-entirely-accurate depth the way a bunch of humans wished to equate their city with a Big Apple.

Plyn City was built in the heart of the M'lez chasm, one of the main glorified cracks in the ground branching out from the great crater, and its odd location had done nothing to stem its growth. For one thing, the marshland at the bottoms of the chasms (which were usually several hundred feet wide) were excellent growing conditions for the kinds of plants Introi could eat, namely Introan rice, wheat, and certain kinds of fruit and reeds that didn't make you puff up or get paralyzed. It was right next to a large path out of the chasms to higher land that wasn't too steep, the grey stone walls of the immense canyons had yielded incredible mineral resources over the eons, and Introi had lived there in one way or another, since there had been Introi at all. Its hefty population of 846 million beings, two-thirds of which where Introi, could live out there entire lives without leaving the city once. Heck, with the new all-in-one neighborhoods built into buildings, you could live your entire life without ever once leaving the building you were born in. One Introi had actually lived his entire life on one _floor_ of his building, but he got very, very bored near the end.

It has been said that the national pastime of Introa is eating, and while no government officially recognizes it, it has also been said that Plyn City is peppered with more restaurants than most continents. Introi, as a rule, were traditionalists, meaning that if one wanted to have authentic Gioni food, or a bite of Jevoitian pepper-curry (not recommended) all one had to do was find the appropriate neighborhood and level of the city.

It was actually Rixivv food Naida was going for tonight, and Scly had recommended this little place in South-East Cliffs to her as being very good. This was understandable, since the place was owned and operated by another branch of the Evcoth family.

The food _was_ excellent, though (the Evcoths had come off the metaphorical boat only a generation or two ago), and it gave Naida a place to look over some of her work. She actually worked for Scly in 'N-Labs Biotechnology and Engineering Industries', but since Scly had gone and opened his mouth at that political rally, he was a head of state and she got to do all the work. It wasn't so bad: Scly paid her more now than he paid himself when he had the job, and she also shared his fascination with biochemistry, though not to the same degree. Scly was… _weird_.

Still, it helped that Scly was so in to his work: Back in the old days, there were often hour-long arguments about whether it should be a T or a G in that gene for lactate digestion, until Reku got up and saved everyone's sanity, usually by saying something along the lines of 'You two argue like an old married couple.'

It hadn't been efficient, but it had ensured quality. Now Scly was all wrapped up in this 'politics' thing, Reku seemed to remember that he had _always_ been a politician, and now everyone expected her to tell them which enzyme goes where.

As she was picking apart something she was eighty-five percent sure wasn't meat, she glanced over some of the genetic blueprints Scly had written in for the Irken restoration project. The ones right here were dealing with how to re-adjust Irken cells to normal levels of Na-3Cl-5, but she noticed that the bottom of the page suddenly shifted over to a completely different genetic format. At first glance, she thought it was ordinary carbon-based water-using genetic format, but she noticed that the identifier code at the top right of the section was ERT instead of the usual INT, AUP, or NBI.

The only reason they'd use a different identifier code was if they were talking about a different planet, but she'd never seen ERT before. She frowned, and not because she realized that the green stuff in her mouth _was_ meat. There were only fifteen identifier codes in use, and ERT wasn't one of them.

Her eyes narrowed. So Scly had found out about some new planet and hadn't told her, huh? Well, she'd see about that! She opened up her little video-transmitter, and called a lab technician back at the office.

His face appeared on the screen, and he immediately flinched when he saw that his boss was in a bad mood.

"Uh, hey Nai- Ms. Entorro, is there anything I can do for you?" He fidgeted, suddenly very aware that there was a stain on his lab coat.

"I need you to go into Scly's office and turn on the computer," She said, getting up and motioning to the waiter that she needed to go.

"Uh, ma'am, I don't have the security clearance to-"

"The password is 2/36/889. It was his pet Ufihmizipv's birthday. Don't ask."

There was a pause as the technician typed that in. He looked back at the screen, "I'm on, ms. Entorro. Um… Is this entirely legal?"

"I want you to open up the search engine and look for files with E, R, and T in the name." She said, ignoring the question, "And, no, it isn't until Scly presses charges. Tell me if you see a title you don't recognize."

"Uh, there's one called 'Earth'. It's labeled as a planet."

"Good, send it to my handheld."

The technician did so, perhaps realizing that not arguing was the best idea, and thirty-five minutes later Naida was on her way up to the next flight through the inter-galactic wormhole, fuming over how much interesting stuff Scly had kept secret. He was gonna hear about this…

* * *

Helen bit her lip as Raj maneuvered the turtle in close, cloaking devices activated, up to a window in the Kremlin.

"Raj, I don't feel comfortable doing this… The man probably isn't right in the head…"

"Think of it as political protest, dear," Raj said maliciously as he opened a hatch, "I have a giant time-traveling turtle, but I can't interfere in the timeline. This is my revenge. He won't be able to sleep peacefully for _weeks_!"

Inside the window, General-Secretary Josef Stalin was filing some paperwork, when he heard a rapping noise at the window. He frowned, and opened it up, to be greeted by the sight of a thin man apparently levitating forty feet off the ground.

Before he had so much as a chance to call for guards, the man yelled, "This one's for Ukraine!" and threw an egg at the dictator's face.

* * *

"_Good Heavens, Watson, I think he updated!"_

Yeah… Sorry about not posting anything for three weeks but… Well, I'll be frank, I ignored it.

After the little break there, though, we'll definitely be looking at an update-a-week again. Onwards, to chapter sixteen!


	16. A long night out

"_I like your sleeves."_

-Napoleon trying to be romantic, _Napoleon Dynamite_.

* * *

Vem sat next to Zim on a plastic folding chair set up in the corner of the room informally labeled the 'Loser Corner', both of them quiet and exhausted.

In front of them, a wild mass of Irkens was seething and jumping to the sounds blaring out of the speakers, merrily continuing into their twelfth straight hour of revelry.

Vem sighed loudly. Lir, the second in command of this entire operation, was out yelling and behaving like a smeet, doing everything physically possible to dishonor the rank of Taller. Tenn, the acting commander, was doing exactly the same, and now she was stuck here, sitting next to the only other sane Irken in the base.

Who was Zim. _The _Zim. The same Zim who had gotten in a giant robotic-destruction suit and began laying waste to Imperial City back on Irk.

She wondered why she put up with this. She was a _Taller_, the second-in-command of the Empire. Well… third, if you counted the Tallests as two, but that implies that one has more authority than the other… plus the Control Brains were technically the same rank as her, but that wasn't important! She was seven feet, five-point-four inches tall, and that meant something in the Irken Empire!

She got up to tell everyone to get back to work, but then sagged as she realized the futility of it all: Even if everyone who should be working was working, there would still be a huge number of Irkens without anything to do. Plus, Lir would just go and make it illegal.

She sat back down and began idly stirring the punch with her finger. "Damn…"

Zim cracked his knuckles. He was frustrated with the Irken Elite as well, but more that they were goofing off in _his _base than wasting time. Skoodge had a concussion, but everyone was still partying away in this big monstrosity in his basement. Come to think of it, the fire marshal should be having a fit about this place: A huge metal room lit up by hundreds of industrial-use lamps, flammable flooring, intoxicating beverages, and one three-foot high exit through an air vent that only let one person through at a time.

Just then the fire marshal stumbled by, obviously drunk, and Zim abandoned that idea.

And _Tenn_… He had expected more from her. She was acting commander of over four thousand Irkens, but she was down here, partying with the rest of them. The only high point of the evening was when the band had started playing the _Invader's March_ (the Empire's national anthem), but they didn't play it any more because everyone thought it was 'boring' (UNPATRIOTIC FOOLS!). The fact that they had then insisted on playing this 'Penny Lane' thing five times only made it worse, and now they had discovered eighties music.

While he was sitting there wondering where this 'Electric Avenue' place was and why they were complaining about everything, he was suddenly grabbed by the arm and hauled into the crowd.

"What the-?" Zim asked in bewilderment, staring as he realized the grinning Irken who had pulled him up was Tenn.

She had unwound to the point where if she got more relaxed her chromosomes would probably unravel. The badge Lir had given her for her promotion was lopsided, she was dancing as manically as the rest of them, and plastered on her face was the most unmilitary looking grin he had seen in his life.

"Come on, Zim!" She yelled, "Live a little!"

Before he could give a suitably scathing response, she grabbed him by the arm and pulled him around in some lopsided pattern that in some less civilized place might be called 'dancing'.

"Uh… Tenn, how much have you had to drink?" Zim asked nervously, looking at the eager crush of Irkens by the refreshment table.

"I don't touch that stuff!" She yelled, giddy as ever, "Messes with your head!"

Zim was about to grab her by the shoulders and shake the insanity out of her, but suddenly he saw the lights in her eyes. She looked so… _alive_. She'd been pleased to see the base, annoyed when he and Skoodge had been fighting, proud when she was promoted, and frustrated when everyone had been playing in the labs, but this was the first time he could ever say she had looked _happy._

He abruptly found himself unable to do anything. His hands felt a bit sweaty, and he thought his tongue was swelling up. The sight of this giddy, happy Tenn was doing things to him no Irken had experienced in several millennia: Neurons fired excitedly, chemicals rushed through his brain madly, he felt his Squeedlyspooch twist nervously, all with the grand result that he was standing there unable to do anything besides listen to every nerve ending in his body say _Wow_.

"Come on!" She yelled, grabbing his arm and provoking a feeble 'Eep,' from Zim, "The next song's starting."

For better or worse, Zim was pulled along to stare feebly at a obliviously giddy Tenn for the duration of every Journey song Skoodge could find.

Vem looked up to see Zim dancing with Tenn. She sighed. "There goes another one…"

* * *

Chejii stepped out of the teleporter, and immediately slunk off behind some fuel silos, eyes darting to and fro in a manner that he thought was very cool, but which immediately drew the attention of every other Irken in the room. When he began sliding across the wall humming secret agent theme-music, everyone decided that it was best to ignore him.

Chejii slipped through the half-open door in a way he thought was secretive (though seen by well over a hundred Irkens) and began to make his way down the corridor, ducking behind a piece of furniture whenever someone came by.

The Meekrob had replaced the Irken's technicians uniform with a black ninja-style robe that looked suspiciously like a bed sheet that had been dipped in paint, and was now thinking very highly of himself for being able to use muscles. He picked up the pace a little and tried to sprint speedily down the hall, but didn't know how to posture oneself when running, and ended up with walking as fast as he could, slowing down whenever an Irken got within two feet of him.

Chejii decided to leap up and crawl through an air vent all secret-agent like, but only managed to take a running leap into a trashcan.

Pulling himself out of yesterday's dinner, and very conspicuously swearing under his breath as he peeled of wrappers, Chejii decided to go back to walking normally. It had gotten him this far, hadn't it?

Usually when you see a middle-aged Irken stumbling down a hallway wrapped in a navy-blue bed sheet, muttering under his breath, and twitching occasionally, you'd report him to the nearest authority. The nearest authority, however, had finally found some Irkens who enjoyed _Hogan's Heroes_, and everyone else had to either get to the spaceships or go to the party.

And so Chejii, the pan-dimensional being of energy possessing an uncooperative body with the goal of killing the most important person in the Armada made his way unobstructed through the base, gathering information on where his target was.

In retrospect, it's actually kind of funny.

* * *

Dib was in a less festive mood, and had he known about the nightclub in Zim's basement he probably would have just been glad for the opportunity.

A little confused on how Zim and Skoodge managed to put together something as classy as a nightclub, but pleased nonetheless.

He held a machine with one hand that looked like someone had taken a Super Soaker and made some highly illegal adjustments, which is, in fact, what he did. It was now set up to fire pulses of electromagnetic energy he hoped would stun a cyborg like Zim, and, with luck, knock his PAK out. He guessed there were maybe a few dozen more Irkens in the base now, for whatever reason, so he planned to sneak in, get Zim, and then get out ASAP, blowing up whatever he could on the way.

The fact that the gun could still squirt water was a matter of style.

Dib went out into the backyard, where a crudely-drawn picture of Zim was posted to the fence. The fact that Dib had recently started using his backyard as a shooting range had distressed the neighbors at first, but they quickly got over it, for two reasons: Number one, Dib was the son of the illustrious Professor Membrane whose power plants brought there electricity bills down to a fraction of what they were, and number two, Dib was the local lunatic. Every neighborhood had one, and everyone seemed to be glad it was Dib and not some middle-aged guy who strangled birds (don't ask).

Dib leveled the extremely cool weapon up to his shoulder, and then lost most of that coolness trying to fit his extremely big head behind the scope. He looked down at the picture of Zim, and tensed, ready to pull off some cool Matrix-style moves, when suddenly an enormous turtle popped into existence in front of him.

Now, when an eight-hundred pound turtle instantly appears in your backyard, the laws of physics generally come rushing back to make up for how they were just broken: the outer skin of the craft immediately heated up as spare energy was converted into molecular motion, the grass underneath it received a nasty shockwave of energy, and all the air that had been right there a second before suddenly had to find somewhere else to occupy.

Dib was blown back by a massive gust of wind as a sharp _CRACK_ echoed off the houses, his face flushed red from the heat. His weapon accidentally misfired, sending a gush of photons at an unsuspecting rosebush. Fortunately, the gun shot a little stream of water which put some of the fires out.

Dib had just been introduced to what it felt like to be a landlord of a large apartment building, and quickly decided to make the Bihars leave. Easier said than done.

Raj jumped out of the turtle, and strode purposefully towards the house in a way that says 'I-have-to-go-and-my-wife-won't-get-out-of-the-bathroom'. Dib decided it was pointless. How was he going to evict them anyways?

As Raj walked by, he blinked in confusion at seeing the younger resident of the house sprawled on the ground with a gun, but he shrugged it off. He'd seen weirder things in life than that, and he'd be seeing plenty more.

When Helen got out of the turtle she was a little more considerate. "Need any help?" She asked en route to the back porch.

"No…" Dib sighed, getting up slowly, "I'm just going off to fight alien monsters all alone. I should be fine. How was your day?"

"Well, we got some Chinese food, but over in China it's just 'food'. Then I popped back to Greece to say hi to a friend, but it got a little awkward when I tried to pick up a conversation she hadn't started yet. Time travel is _weird_. Then Raj spent a few hours egging Stalin, playing ding-dong-ditch with Hitler, and I'm not sure, but I think he used a can of spray cheese on Napoleon. He loves doing that."

Dib blinked. "I'm pretty sure there's an ordinance against doing that or something."

"Well, there _should_ be. It kinda went to Raj's head that even in the future this was the only time machine known of. It's hard to police the time stream, and that means we can basically do what we want. Of course, whenever we go to far in the future, there's always this bunch of physicists who know about us and try to talk us into surrendering the turtle. They say it's for the good of humanity or something, but they just want a time machine to take apart and make more of."

"You claim ownership over a gigantic cyborg turtle capable of traversing time and space in an instant, but you don't even know where it came from?"

Helen smiled. "Ain't life great?"

Raj walked back out of the house. "Ready to go dear? I want to get to the planetarium early and freak out the scientists before dinner."

Dib frowned: He just noticed the Bihars were wearing different, stranger clothes than the last time he saw them. These were flat white, with little chrome decals etched in on the sleeves and stuff. It looked like something out of the _Jetsons_.

As the couple walked back towards the turtle in their '1950s-vision-of-what-the-future-will-look-like' clothes, Dib realized that was the point, and shrugged. It was the noble pursuit of discovery and science that had probably made their time machine, but the Bihars were human, and could use advanced technology for any end they wanted.

Raj smiled as he climbed through the hatch. "Should we use the outer space voices this time? '_Take me to your leader, Earthlings_'."

Helen laughed. "I don't think they'll be scared of your Marvin the Martian voice, Raj. Besides, then we'd have to wear the stupid antennae things, and they're all scratchy."

"All right, we'll tell them we're from the future and… Uh… I got it: We'll tell them to invest all their stock in some little bubblegum company."

"Honey, that's a little mean. They could lose a lot of money on that."

"Half their stock then… What's Dib doing with that laser thingy?"

"He's going to assassinate Zim." Helen said nonchalantly, as if reading a newspaper.

"Should we do something?"

"Nah. They both live anyway."

And with that the giant turtle lifted off like a helicopter, and set off to go freak out some physicists, while below them Chejii and Dib both moved to take out the Irken Invasion's two leaders, all the while remaining ignorant of the massive Natrian fleet that would arrive within a few hours and bring the war to backwards little Earth.

Ain't life great?

* * *

Chejii was succumbing to a potentially fatal Meekrob disease: The body he was in was starting to bond completely with his energy form. Slowly but surely, the spark of energy that contained the Meekrob's consciousness was being replaced with currents in the nerves, replacing the lesser functions of his ethereal body with hardwired nerves and impulses. Within the course of a few days, the process would become harder and harder to reverse, until the most vital parts of his mind were being done in the Irken brain. He would become, for all intents and purposes, an Irken, his spirit trapped in the physical body, nothing remaining of his former self except for a small bundle of energy hiding in the cerebellum. Many Meekrob horror stories were of Meekrob possessing bodies for too long, becoming addicted to nervous stimulation through the inferior eyes and ears, and not leaving the body in time to avoid entombment in a short-lived, fleshy form.

All Chejii was noticing, however, was that everything was starting to get more interesting.

He stumbled in a daze down the air vent, the once dim and unimportant colors lighting up into a vibrant spectrum never seen by ordinary Meekrob. Every time a hand brushed against a wall or his foot thumped on the floor, Chejii was more and more thrilled with this new body, with its clear sense of in and out.

_Maybe I can keep this body_, He thought, a little slow as his mind adjusted to firing electricity and chemicals through a brain, _It'll be like a summer home or something… Wow, the guys at the base gotta try this out… Especially the 'dizzy' parts_.

The fact that he was now grinning like a maniac while stumbling down the hall earned him a few more stares, but not nearly as many as if they had known about the two knives hidden in his clothing. He didn't want to use his new PAK weaponry: It was vital to use blades to kill the commander and not lasers, 'cause Ninjas did it that way, and Ninjas were awesome.

Most of Chejii's higher thinking was out for repairs at the moment, and the Meekrob assassin half-strode half-fell into the dance floor with the IQ of a two-year-old. A sadistic, racial supremacist two-year-old, but a two-year-old nonetheless.

Meanwhile, Zim was continually telling himself to not do anything stupid as he danced with ever-giddy Tenn in this 'waltz' thing that was making his palms sweat.

Take pity on the Irken: He really had no idea what was going on, why he suddenly cared so much what Tenn thought of him, did she _really_ mean it when she said his rants were funny, if she thought he was competent, and so on and so forth. He found himself stuck with an annoying little voice in his head that seemed hell-bent on getting Tenn to notice and admire him, and right now it was getting annoying.

_You haven't said anything in six minutes,_ The voice said, _You want her to think you're weird? Say something, anything!_

Zim glanced up at the ceiling, desperate for some inspiration, and proceeded to say the dumbest thing he'd said in a long time:

"Nice lights."

_Idiot._

"What?" Tenn asked, confused and hopefully coming out of the delirium.

Zim decided to go with it: "Skoodge got some high-quality lights. Industrial strength. They, uh, look nice from this angle."

Tenn frowned and bent over towards where Zim's head was (getting much closer to him in the process and eliciting another 'Eep') to see what the big deal was with the lights, when suddenly a knife shot through the air a inch from Tenn's head, where it had been up until a moment ago, flew through the air and embedded itself halfway to the hilt in the wall.

"Poopy heads!" Chejii yelled, his intelligence nose-diving, "I wanted to hit her! No fair! Do over, do over!"

Zim reacted very well under the circumstances, responding to this new threat by charging Chejii as he pulled out the second knife, and pinning him to the wall.

"Not in my base you don't!" Zim spat, feeling a growing sense of déjà vu. How many times were these things going to happen?

"Meany!" Chejii howled, viciously kicking the Invader, "You're ruining my _special_ mission! You can't do that on _my _special day! I wanna-"

At this point the speakers, cheerily unaware of the life and death struggle near the punchbowl, began to play the next song, one of the last from the eighties. Chejii's eyes widened and he began twitching as the techno opening started up.

Zim let go of him, realizing that his attacker was a Meekrob and probably wouldn't enjoy the music so much.

Chejii sank to the ground, and clamped his hands over his head. What was this horrible noise? A series of repeating, loud, unnatural notes, coming at him too fast for the shoddy recycled wiring in his body to handle. Pain, huge, unadulterated pain, began to pour in from his beleaguered optic sensors, as his muscles began randomly twitching. Chejii was losing control.

"Lights!" Zim yelled, seeing the Meekrob struggle to stand up, "Turn on the strobe lights, the light show, the disco ball, anything!"

As it were, the lights came on at exactly the wrong time in the song for Chejii: The human singer had started, the techno was still going on in the background, and now his eyes were a confusing swirl of flashing and swirling light.

'_You spin me right round, baby, right round, like a record baby-'_

Chejii let out a scream of mortal anguish unlike anything to ever come out of an Irken's mouth before, and began thrashing and convulsing on the floor. He had no control over any of his limbs, and his breath was becoming more and more irregular. Eventually even his heartbeat began to fall out of control, rapidly speeding up and slowing down.

The Meekrob was helpless, watching the entire show like a moviegoer, dully feeling every time a limb smacked against a wall. A horrible burning sensation built up in his body as minimal blood flow and oxygen began to take their toll.

_This is it_, he thought weakly as the edges of his vision were swallowed up in an expanding field of black, _I'm going to die_.

By a strange twist of fate, that was the moment the fuse could no longer stand full-blast speakers, strobes, and heaters, and immediately everything stopped.

Chejii immediately sucked in a huge breath of air, and, thanking every deity ever worshipped by a fleshy, he got to his feet and sprinted through the confused crowd to the door.

By a stranger twist of fate, this was also when his emotions gave out.

Chejii made it about four feet before he stopped running, and half-fell half-skidded another three.

He wasn't stuck as before, he just wouldn't move a muscle. There was no anticipation of escape, no pride for making it out alive, no joy at leaving this death trap of a body, no pain as, yet again, he stopped breathing, no fear of what the Irkens to do to him, and no anger or sense of duty to go back and kill Tenn. His entire system of positive and negative reinforcement was out, and so he saw no reason for anything, not even thinking. He was just… there.

Zim walked tentatively over to the fallen Meekrob, and nervously poked him in the side with his foot.

"That's… weird." Zim said with a frown, "In my experience, highly trained Meekrob assassins don't just flop over like that."

"How do you know he's a Meekrob?" Tenn asked, her imminent death bringing her back to sanity.

Zim gestured at the knife in the wall with one hand, while checking Chejii's pulse with another. 'No ordinary Irken has the willpower to make his muscles do something like that. Involuntaries are still working; He just isn't moving."

This was before, yet again, Chejii's mind shifted, and he spasmed onto his back and began breathing again.

He groaned, and leaned forward into a sitting position. He had a headache, everything hurt, he was stuck in the Irken underground base, and-

-he looked up at the crowd-

-exactly thirty lasers were aimed at his head, and counting.

Pride (being the bloated and oversized thing that it is) was not fully functional yet, so even in this desperate situation, Chejii still had one option left to him, an option left to even the most hopeless and miserable.

He curled up into a ball and cried like a baby.

* * *

Yes, yes, I know I specifically said that this would be done a week ago, but I realized only last week that I have a science paper worth twenty percent of my grade due Friday. Crap.

In other news, I will be trying harder to get it down to a week, but no promises this time. At least this one was extra long.


	17. Dysfunctional family

"_Ever since I was a young smeet I wanted to pass Probing Day like a Slor-beast passes her young: Jiggly, and full of juice!"_

-Zim, sharing his hopes and dreams with GIR, _Walk for your lives_

* * *

All things considered, the night was going pretty well.

The Irken Armada had been enjoying their first night off in a _long_ time, and even now were starting to get the party going again, Skoodge had sufficiently recovered from his injury to stand in the corner and rub his head painfully, the Computer was holding a 'Human Movie Night' up in the living room (documentaries were always a big hit: 'What kind of idiot tries to take over his _own_ planet?'), and Chejii hadn't killed anyone.

Yet.

At the moment, the Meekrob was bound stolen-hand and foot to a chair in a lead-lined room, with the threat that if so much as one tentacle of energy tried to get out of that body, he would be killed on the spot. Tenn, a little steamed over nearly being killed, had volunteered to conduct the interrogation.

"So," She said, staring unblinkingly at the Meekrob, "Care to tell us who you are?"

"Never." He spat defiantly.

Tenn reached over and hit play on a stereo: '_She blinded me with SCIENCE!_'

"Chejii, rank-five infiltrator in the Meekrobian third division under General Metao, formally Private under commander Circi for the past five months, worked as Janitor, class eight, at the third division's base under the northern polar ice cap, signed up two Earth years ago, raised in the Southwestern superstructure on Meekrob, third level!" Chejii wailed pitifully, "Turn it off, TURN IT OFF!"

Tenn hit another button, and it stopped. "Really spilled your guts there, didn't you? Well, I guess you're not used to having guts."

"Shut up…" Chejii moaned, looking sick.

"How about more details about this base?"

"I'll never… betray… Meekro-"

'-_Don't you want me, baby? Don't you want-'_

"Meekrobian primary base on planet Delta, established about one Earth year ago for the purpose of examining, experimenting on, and eventually collecting large numbers of human beings to be used in the invasion of the Irken Empire! STOP IT!"

Tenn hit the button again, smiling. "I think we're making real progress here."

Chejii moaned.

* * *

Meanwhile, out in the inky void of space, all was silent.

This is probably because there was no air out there for there to be a sound in: Believe me, had there been air, it would have been pretty loud.

With a silent tear that ripped at the fabric of the dimensions, the stars wavered and parted, revealing a white sliver of space-time that grew to a massive circle, spat out a space fleet, and shrunk back to nothingness in an instant. The craft, freshly arrived from a sub-dimension where there was no gravity, groaned a bit as they adjusted to the interfering pulls of a massive star and its planets.

Scly stood on the bridge of the command ship, and immediately sent orders to the crews of the rest of the fleet that all weapon energy was to be diverted to the shields, and that they were going to head for Earth as quickly as possible.

He knew that if there was some enemy force invading the planet, they weren't going for _Independence Day_-style big ships and explosions. If they had any assault craft, they be going for maneuverability, speed, and stealth, so weapons and lasers wouldn't help anyways. No, they were going to attack, probably a head on run, guns blazing, until they realized the Natrians had seen them coming and they broke off.

Part of Scly was worried he was fitting too well into the role of Admiral Evcoth of the Natrian Sixth Fleet. The other part was more interested in the BLT (minus the L) Scly had learned how to make on Earth, and was now enjoying while everyone else geared up for battle.

On cue, the technicians to his left began yelling out that small craft were rapidly approaching the flanks of the fleet. Scly chewed the sandwich thoughtfully as everyone looked at him for what to do. The pictures on screen showed essentially flying needles, devoting huge amounts of power to engines and weaponry, with almost no visible life support or shielding. The ships shot straight at the flanks of his fleet, before suddenly and unexpectedly slamming themselves against the shields.

_So,_ He thought, as one by one the ships impacted on the heavy-duty shielding, _Obviously they don't care too much about those ships, so either the pilots don't matter or they aren't inside. They can't be too big, or at least not breathe to much. Probably both. Maybe hive-minded insects? The Irkens are too big, and any bugs much smaller than that wouldn't have the brainpower to build it. Maybe a Queen came up with the technology? No she'd be too busy. Besides, if they were in a hive they'd be going for all-out domination by swarming._

As one of the ships streaked towards the command bridge, Scly quickly told a technician to take a recording of it, though the meaning was a little hard to pick out through bits of sandwich stuck in his mouth.

They did so, and Scly brought the file up on the main screen. He watched the ship slowly buckle up against the invisible shield like it was hitting a wall four times, before he found what he was looking for.

Using one hand to manipulate the footage and the other to hold the BT, he froze the image on the right frame, and zoomed in on the space immediately behind the crumpled ship. Sure enough, the entire crew gasped as they saw the glowing form of a Meekrob, safely exiting his ship, already cloaking the lower half of his body to not emit light, the top half dimming as well.

"So," Scly said, still eating the sandwich and turning to face the crew, "We're dealing with energy beings. No physical body to speak of: Most of their mass comes from the extremely light disc of ionized hydrogen you can see in the center," Here he made vague gestures towards the Meekrob's 'torso', "Where we can assume all the mental activity takes place: Scans show that the hydrogen is locked in a crystal-like structure that can redirect electricity. If push comes to shove, think of it as the brain, and shoot there. The rest of the body seems to be made out of photons orbiting in regular patterns, so I want EMPs prepared for when we reach Earth. Only use lasers on these guys: Bullets or a punch would go right through them. That's all. Proceed with the operation."

Scly walked off the bridge amidst hundreds of soldiers staring at him in awe. Scly never understood why everyone was so worked up over his intelligence: The realization that he was abnormally intelligent was like waking up one morning to find that the TV in the living room was a thirty-two inch plasma.

In any case, Scly was much better at his old job than his new one: He missed his practical, down-to-earths science, and he woke up at night 'sleep-splicing' DNA. He enjoyed his work at N-Labs much more than he enjoyed being a High Council Member, but he was stuck in politics because of his stupid principles, and he still had another six years to go before he could finally get back to work. This was assuming that he got re-elected, but given his polls and the fact that they had trouble finding someone who would even try to run against him, he doubted it. For better or worse, he was stuck running a massive nation, because his dumb conscience would never let him get away with handing the Empire over to some newbie who would go and screw up the economy.

The only thing that gave him hope at this point was his term limit: Only six more years, at most, and then he could get back to his life. Until then, it was just more racking up points for the history books and all the unbridled philanthropy he could afford. Maybe he could even find the time to get married before he got old.

_One thing at a time, Scly,_ he scolded himself, _We can work on not being single later_.

He made himself another sandwich, and plunged back in to the Natrian political fray.

* * *

In retrospect, it might not have been such a good idea to hold a stake-out against your alien enemies on the neighbor's roof.

Using a combination of fires escapes and running jumps, Dib had made his highly dangerous and likely illegal way across the roofs of Zim's neighborhood, planning to get in through the Voot Cruiser bay in the roof when Zim flew out for one of his regular nighttime jaunts. Then, he could slip into the lower levels of the base, wait for Zim to show up again, kill him, then run out of there as fast as possible. He'd blow up everything in his path, hopefully including this dangerous Tenn girl who was aiding the mission in some way.

A small part of Dib's conscience couldn't reconcile itself to killing two intelligent beings, no matter the cause, but the vast majority was more concerned with the six and a half billion human lives at sake. Dib had matured considerably since the beginning of his little war against Zim, and he was determined to save his species at all costs. So focused was he on this task, that he understandably freaked out when he suddenly hear Zim saying "You know, that's actually a pretty good idea." coming from behind him.

Dib jumped a foot into the air, quickly aiming his makeshift weapon at the alien with quaking hands.

"Z-Zim!" He yelped, "P-prepare to m-m-meet your d-doom!"

Zim rolled his eyes. "Pitiful human, you're obviously experiencing a failure of nerve. You think you can attack and kill a centuries-old alien invader with vastly superior technology and a psychology you barely understand?"

"I can try!" Dib snapped, regaining control and firing wildly at Zim.

The Irken extended his PAK legs and moved a foot to the right, letting the blast impact against another rooftop. "That's impressive, worm. Your actually using basic-level energy weapons. How quaint."

Dib fired again and again, missing his target as the Irken moved with blurring speed. "Such a poor approach, though: Coming up against your enemy by going rooftop to rooftop with a powerful energy source near you, _on the same level as an Irken scanning array_."

Zim gestured towards the massive radio dish on his roof, then nimbly dodged another blast. "On top of that, the knowledge of the base that you hoped to use once you were in is obsolete: There are _thousands_ of Irkens in there, and I'm sure they'd be glad to meet a real-live human resistance operative. Sloppy, Dib, very sloppy."

"Shut up!" Dib snapped, missing again and again. Suddenly, Zim's claw-like hand was wrapped around his wrist like a handcuff, and the gun was ripped from his hands.

"Did you think I wouldn't be able to get to you on the roof? I was born and bred in gravity much higher than your inferior planet's, and I have a robotic system to pull me up here as soon as my sensors gave you away. Irken technological might wins again!"

Zim began to push Dib towards the edge, bending the human over to throw off his center of gravity.

"Zim! You can't just kill me!" Dib shrieked in horror.

"Why not? I've been trying to do it for a long time: It might be fun. Besides, you humans don't break _that_ easily. Though it _would_ be a lot easier to be chased around by a cripple."

With a sudden, unexpected shove, Zim sent Dib over the side. Dib hung in the air for a second as his body began accelerating, his face frozen in shock. Abruptly he began to accelerate downwards, and he screamed in horror. Flailing his limbs desperately to get a handhold, he managed to pull himself into a head-up position that saved his life. When he hit the ground, he landed on his shin. _Hard_. He rolled a little, and managed to curl into a ball at the base of Zim's house, using all his willpower not to cry in front of his enemy.

Zim laughed from his aerial vantage point. "Well, Dib, you have demonstrated yet again the inferiority of the human race. I would have just shot you in the back, but that wouldn't have been very sporting. Tenn says I can't kill you, so you can just crawl to your pathetic human medical center for attention."

Dib bit his lip to restrain a sob of pain, then looked savagely at his enemy. "How?" He demanded, not trusting himself to keep him composure for a longer sentence.

"Use a pay phone or something!"

Dib's mouth opened in shock, and Zim winced. A little kernel of hope formed in Dib's chest; Zim wasn't totally heartless, he'd at least get him to the hospital, nothing would be permanent, and maybe he could play off Zim's compassion in the future-

Zim dug around in his pocket for a while, and dropped eighty-two cents on Dib's head. "There! Remember, that's only good for one call."

* * *

Professor Membrane was giving a long, rambling speech to a crowd of people who were there to smile, take notes, and not really pay attention to it at all.

Again.

Gaz sat in a little folding chair resting lopsidedly on the grand wooden strange, a few feet from the opulent podium where her father was rambling about science, hope, change, and other boring stuff like that. The fact that they would be launching a rocket soon had briefly gotten her attention, but had lost it just as fast when the Professor assured everyone it wasn't going to explode.

She was playing her GameSlave, as usual, ignoring everyone, as usual, and wondering where the heck Dib was, not usual.

The only reason that she cared was that if Dib didn't show up, the journalists would start asking questions, and she knew from experience that then her father would then have to go and find Dib to preserve his reputation on national TV, and that inevitably meant she'd have to stop playing her GameSlave to get into the car and buckle up while her father played the role of 'concerned parent'.

Plus, the fact that he was gone meant he was fighting Zim, which meant there was probably going to be something big on the news that would distract her.

_Come on_, she thought, _If you get hurt I'm going to kill you._

Her father continued to appease his many fans with blather about, 'Going to the stars' and 'Filling up the void', but Gaz wasn't impressed. The fact that she ignored Zim's actions didn't mean she didn't realize the 'void' was already pretty full, but as far as she was concerned, that just meant more people who could bother her.

She continued to press buttons mechanically as her mind sort of hung there in her head, thinking about whatever bothered it at the moment. Gaz's detachment from reality was the envy of any Meekrob: Physical pain was just neurons getting all whiney and irritated, and she could block that out easily. Emotional pain, on the other hand, had hit her pretty hard and pretty early, so now she just avoided the deceptively cheery world, dressing up in smiles and hugs to make you think it was all permanent, that it couldn't get taken away, that a certain workaholic scientist and his original Perpetual Energy Generator couldn't _possibly_ accidentally blow up his wife in a-

_You gotta stop thinking like that or you'll end up looking like a wimp_, She snapped at her self-pity, which retreated back into its corner of her mind like a scolded dog. Emotional pain could also be dealt with, but you had to be more careful. The key was to not get reminded of her by anything.

And so she really didn't care when her father was cut short in the middle of his speech, didn't really care when a doctor was next to him hissing "_…hospital…urgent…_", didn't really care when the crowd of reporters began murmuring frantically about what was going on.

She did care when her father bent over and told her that he had to go, and that she needed to entertain the crowd while he was gone, though.

* * *

Ugh... Finals suck.

Sorry folks, but given how busy I am I think the next few chapters are going to be spaced out pretty thinly. Think of it as an interrupted hiatus. I'd also like to tell you all that we're moving towards the endgame here, and all these plot threads are finally going to be tied up. We're about halfway!


	18. ER

**-And now, a word from our President-**

"Ow! My brains!"

-Zaphod Beeblebrox, President of the Galaxy, _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_

* * *

There are much better places to wake up in than a hospital. Your bed, for one thing. Another would be a sleeping bag, on a nice camping trip. Maybe even the backseat of a car, because your house is infested with bugs and the exterminator doesn't recommend sleeping in clouds of poisonous gas. Maybe your grandparents' house, because you're on vacation out to their house in Michigan. There are any number of places you can wake up in this world, so Dib cursed his luck for it being a hospital. A hospital means something's _wrong_.

Of course, there are worse things than waking up in a hospital: Waking up in a hospital with the doctor whispering anxiously to your father after getting shoved off a roof by a psychotic alien for one thing.

Dib groaned, and sat up. Bad idea. He groaned again, and lay back down, head throbbing with pain. Memory was one of those things he couldn't spare enough energy to thoroughly look over, but he dimly recalled crawling to a pay phone, calling 911, and collapsing immediately. He felt light-headed, nauseous, and extremely tired. Oh, so very, very tired…

He massaged his temples slowly as Professor Membrane and a nervous-looking doctor walked into the room.

"How you feeling, Dib?" The doctor asked, smiling uneasily in a way that suggested he had no idea what was going on. Membrane just stared at him. "Any better?"

"No."

"Great! Can you, uh, try moving your leg for us?" He said, drumming his fingers on his clipboard.

Dib sat up and waved one leg slowly back and forth over the edge of the operating table. He stared at the doctor in the way patients usually do when they're convinced their caretaker is an idiot.

The doctor coughed nervously. "No, uh, the broken one."

Dib stared at the doctor a moment longer. "The broken one?" He asked in a deadpan tone.

"Yes."

'The leg?"

"Uh-huh."

"That was broken."

"Yes…"

"The broken leg."

The doctor coughed again, and failed horribly in an attempt to smile reassuringly.

Dib blinked. "Just to be clear, you want me to move my _broken leg_, which has so much anesthetic in it it's going numb?"

The doctor looked at his clipboard. "You, didn't uh… you didn't receive any anesthetic."

The deadpan look returned. Professor Membrane still stood in the corner of the room like an eerie piece of furniture.

The doctor valiantly tried to resume his façade of control over the situation. "You're leg was so badly torn up, we couldn't find an artery to inject anesthetic in. You were, uh, thrashing around a bit, so we put you to sleep, and uh… You can't feel it?" He said, sweating alarmingly.

Dib looked down at his bloodied clothes, and carefully pulled up his pant leg.

He immediately regretted it.

To start, there was a horizontal gash about three inches long, scabbing over and filling with pus in some areas, right below his kneecap. The skin around the wound was an ugly shade of purple, and the skin above the tear was scraped so badly by the concrete it was red.

And yet, amazingly, he couldn't feel anything.

He reached down, and prodded the skin just above the gash. Nothing. He poked the gash itself. Nothing. He ran his hand down the length of his leg, and found that he was completely numb below the knee and above the ankle.

He looked up, and stared at the doctor, who stared right back. Dib suddenly realized that he had been pushed off a roof but couldn't feel it, was stumping a trained medical professional as to what was happening, and his father was still standing in the corner staring at an x-ray photo, all while evil alien insects were plotting to take over the world and annihilate the human race. It wasn't a good position.

"We, uh… We believe you may have an interesting blood condition, Dib."

"Interesting?"

"Um, uh, we… Maybe you should look at the x-ray." The doctor said, taking the photo from Membrane's hands and handing it to Dib.

At first, Dib couldn't see anything. Just a leg bone, with a series of cracks emanating from a fractured part of the shin. Except all the fragments of bone were sticking in their proper places. It was if someone had taken a pencil and outlined all the places where Dib's bone could have broken, there only being hairline cracks to show that it had ever fragmented at all.

He frowned, and looked closer, when suddenly he saw that along each fracture there were about a hundred or so small metal links bridging the gaps. The staple-length rods, barely large enough to see on the eight by ten high-resolution x-ray (courtesy of Membrane Labs Medical Supplies), were all that was holding his leg together.

He slowly swung his leg. Nothing.

"The Professor requested, uh, that we take some higher magnification photos, uh…" The doctor continued nervously, handing Dib another sheet, "And, uh, we found this."

It was a zoomed-in picture of one of the metal rods, blown up to fill the entire sheet. It was actually a thin tube of small metal orbs, linked with even smaller filaments. At the ends of the tube, more orbs were linking themselves to the tube.

For five and a half annoyingly long seconds, Dib stared at the picture, before realizing exactly what they were: In one of Dib's brief stints in space, Dib had been abducted by an alien identifying itself as an Introi for a psychological evaluation of the human race. Considering that the others selected for the evaluation were Gaz, Zim, Tak, and GIR, Dib felt sorry for Scly.

To get a copy of the English language, Scly had given him a shot full of small nanobots which latched on to his neurons and sent the information to one of his computers. The nanobots were still floating around in his bloodstream, and apparently served their host in times of crisis. They were rebuilding the bone, and had also cut off all incoming signals from that section of leg: He could move it but he couldn't feel.

His pulse began to race as he looked over the information: The nanobots were made mostly of titanium, powered, apparently, by human body heat, and were actually funneling calcium from the bloodstream and manually rebuilding the bone. This was hundreds, maybe even _thousands_ of years beyond anything the human race had ever accomplished. This was a miracle of engineering. This was _evidence_.

A smile slowly worked its way across his face, ruining the last of the doctor's tattered self-confidence. "I'd like to speak with my father alone please."

The doctor looked like he was going to protest, thought better of it, and left the room. Professor Membrane stood quietly, staring at Dib eye-to-eye, both of them sensing the storm coming.

"Dib," Professor Membrane said in his most severe tone of voice, "I understand you have… odd scientific interests, but I don't want you to take it too far. I realize that I have a large and highly advanced at-home lab in the basement, and that it might prove temptation for curious eyes. Have you been using my equipment? You remember last Halloween."

In fact, Dib _had _taken some welding equipment, a small nuclear battery, thirty yards of copper wiring, and a tesla coil to make his squirt-gun of death, but he wasn't exactly eager to tell his father that.

"No, dad, I didn't experiment on myself. These came from somewhere else."

"Where?"

"I'll tell you, on the condition that you will believe me, no matter what I say."

"Okay, son."

"_Whatever _I say, alright? If I say Bigfoot with a sombrero you have to believe me."

"I promise."

"I'll be totally honest with you if you swear to believe me."

"I swear."

Dib was silent for a few moments. From far off, he heard the mumbled noise of the hospital intercom. He sighed, blinked, and looked his father right in the eyes… well, goggles.

"Several months ago, I was taken aboard an alien spaceship for a psychological evaluation of the human race, intended to see if their was something in our psyche that would make us a threat to the wider universal community. The metal braces holding my legs together are advanced, microscopic robots that were injected into my bloodstream to make a copy of the English language from my memory and transmit it to a computer database for communication. The robots are also capable of implanting memories, controlling the human nervous system to induce pain or manipulate muscles, monitor body activity, and link up to seal breaches in the skin, bone, or blood vessels, aiding healing. I'm not fully aware of their capabilities, but I believe they run off of our body heat, each carry small processors that can be effectively linked up into one larger computer, and are able to work cohesively together to do things on the magnitude of seeking and killing all cancerous cells in a body, blocking the absorption of excess fat into the body, and replacing small amounts of lost brain tissue."

Silence reigned supreme for thirty seconds, as the Professor considered what had just been said. Dib inhaled, and suddenly smelled the antiseptic aroma of hospitals, all but drowned out under the influence of Dib's raw wound and filthy clothing. The doctor outside was pacing, his dull footsteps echoing across the linoleum.

Finally, Membrane spoke. "Son… When I asked you where these came from, you said you'd be honest with me-"

"_I KNEW IT!_" Dib yelled, pointing an accusatory finger at his father and leaping to his feet. "I knew you couldn't accept it, even if it was staring you in the face! You're just too stuck up! You can't admit you were wrong! Ya hear that, world? PROFESSOR MEMBRANE WAS **WRONG**!"

"Dib, this is serious!" Membrane yelled, "You experimented on yourself! Yes, you managed to get a good result, but that's dangerous! First you test it on _convicts_! What have I told you since you were three? '_Guinea pigs, dogs, monkeys, convicts, and THEN yourself.' _Why were you using my equipment! ? God, Dib, just because you're my son-"

"Oh, _that's_ what this is about," Dib said triumphantly, grinning at figuring it out, "You got beaten to the punch! But no, it couldn't be aliens, no, the only person smart enough to top _me_ is _my_ son, using _my_ equipment, in _my_ lab-"

"That's not true!"

"LIAR!"

Out in the hall, the doctor whistled with unconvincing calm as a nurse walked bye, eyebrow arched.

"Prove it then!" Dib said, folding his arms across his chest. "Look me in the eye and tell me that it's not just because I'm your son."

"It's not just because-"

"In the _eye_." Dib repeated.

The yelling abruptly stopped. Membrane looked down at his son, twin points of fury glaring right back at him. Slowly, uncomfortably, Membrane reached up and unclipped his goggles. He blinked, his grey eyes unaccustomed to unfiltered light, the blood vessels standing out from days without sleep, a red band of skin encircling his face where the strap had been. He unbuttoned his lab coat, revealing a small mouth pulled into a neutral position, shaded with stubble since the professor's last shave. Membrane looked into his son's narrowed, accusing eyes, tried to speak, and found he couldn't.

The terrible silence returned, and the room filled with the tension of Dib awaiting his father's words while knowing they wouldn't come.

"Yeah, that's what I thought," Dib said eventually, looking away to glare at a biohazard symbol.

"Son…" Membrane began, scratching nervously behind his head, "I… I just don't understand why you're so obsessed with all this, this paranormal stuff when you've got a universe full of _real_ science to amaze you. Remember when I took you to the planetarium when you were little? You were just happy to stare at the stars."

"Yes, but it's an even better universe when there are little planets with aliens orbiting around them. More stuff to know, more to explore, more that you and your precious 'scientific community' haven't done yet. I _know_ this is real, dad, I've been fighting one of them for a year. If you spent half the time you do at work with us at home, you'd have found out too by now." Dib said, turning back to face his father.

"So I'm supposed to neglect my work because of your alien? Dib, I am a man of _science_. The world depends on me to invent and discover things that better the lives of millions."

"You don't want to neglect your _work_? What about _us_?"

Membrane rolled his eyes. "Oh, come on, Dib. I don't neglect you: Look at all the stuff I get you kids? A nice TV, good food, a dog-"

"-Which Gaz starved to death."

"-clothes," Membrane continued, ignoring that comment, "Christmas presents… Uh… autographs…"

"_Autographs_? What, a signed card for Thanksgiving? You're home less than forty-eight hours a year, dad. If that's not neglect, than I don't know what is."

"Oh come on! Starving children in India would love to be in your position."

"Well, I'm not a starving child in India, now am I?"

"Look, Dib, you're just going through an angry 'blame dad' phase because your hitting puberty. You just don't understand how good you and your sister have it."

A sudden, horrible thought occurred to Dib. "You didn't leave her at the launch ceremony, did you?"

"…No…"

* * *

The vast, grand hallway, packed with models of the spacecraft, reporters, technical readouts, and a live video feed to Mission Control, was entirely silent save for the beeping of Gaz's Gameslave.

All the news reporters were huddled in the far corner of the room, too terrified of the demonic girl to even remain next to her. One man who had tried to interview her had come back ashen-faced, terrified, and wouldn't stop mumbling unhelpful things like '…the knuckles…the knuckles…'. The people down at Cape Canaveral had assumed something horrible had happened, and were now trying to contact Professor Membrane's cell phone, which, being set to vibrate, only added a faint buzzing to the room.

The _Time_ Magazine reporter poked a Fox News camera guy in the back. "Wanna make a run for it?"

The cameraman looked at Gaz, twiddling away her third hour on the Gameslave, then at the poor man who was now curled in a fetal position and sobbing softly to himself. He shook his head at the _Time_ guy. "We'd never make it out the door."

* * *

Back at the hospital, the Professor made a mental note to write a formal letter of apology to all news companies present at the launch.

"So," Dib continued, having seen through Membrane's lie, "You left Gaz _alone_ to 'entertain' everyone at your big light-speed unveiling event, because you wanted to come to the hospital to see your insane son? I don't buy it. You're not that nice… I get it, you didn't want to _publicly_ neglect me. Bad for publicity, isn't it?"

Membrane looked like he was about to deny it, but stopped, unable to master the whole eye-contact thing.

"Son, I really care about you, it's just that I have a career to look after. If I spent all my time home with you two, how would I earn money?"

"How do ordinary scientists make money?"

Membrane chose to ignore that. "Dib, you have to stop thinking about yourself. People need me. It's not a easy as 'Well, I think I'll be heading home. Good luck on that cure for cancer!'."

"Oh, yes, you've made so many wonderful inventions," Dib snapped sarcastically, rolling his eyes, "Like SuperToast. You managed to come up with an instant steroid disguised as an ordinary piece of bread. Yeah, _nothing_ bad could _possibly _come of that. You screw up on half your experiments, and then you go and start selling them to the general public. The government doesn't want to 'hold back' brilliant scientists of your caliber, so now you're making money off of 'Acidic Noodles'."

"I do not screw up!"

"Been to the cemetery lately, dad?" Dib said viciously, pointing at the Professor's ring finger, where the outline of a wedding band could be seen through the thick rubber gloves.

This time, all was silent. The doctor outside had gotten too weirded out by eavesdropping and had gone for a soda. The hum of machinery could no longer be heard.

"That was an accident." Membrane said, a hurt tone of voice conveying the fact that Dib had crossed a sacred line.

"Pretty big accident." Dib said. He still had vivid memories of his mother picking him and Gaz up from school, driving them to the lab, then going inside to maker her husband take a break and go out for ice cream with them. And then an explosion.

For a few minutes, neither of them said anything, both of them reliving that day that stood out like a tombstone on the calendar: May fifteenth, eight years ago.

Finally Membrane spoke up. "Son…" He began.

* * *

Meanwhile, at Mission Control, people were looking amongst themselves nervously. Professor Membrane was nowhere to be found, and the launch was set to start in a few minutes.

"Where is he?" A technician hissed to the director of the mission, "What do we do?"

The director bit his lip and sighed. "Continue with the operation. Membrane told me personally not to let anything stop us. Tell the pilot he has the all clear."

* * *

"Is there something I can do? Is there something I can tell you, or give you to help you with this alien thing? I don't want to do this anymore, Db, I really don't."

"You can retire, put all your money in the bank, live off the interest, and take care of us."

* * *

"All right, Rob, you got the all clear." A Mission Control officer's voice came over the speakers.

"Roger that, mission Control, I'm preparing the engines now." Robert 'Rob' Fredrickson said, flipping several switches in the cockpit of his craft. A tingling feeling was spreading from his stomach up into his chest. First man to travel faster than light itself? This was gonna be big…

"Ten…nine…eight…seven…six…"

It's probably all for the best his excitement wasn't ruined by the knowledge a large Natrian fleet was watching and waiting for him to do his job.

* * *

"Or maybe you can actually believe me when I tell you about Zim," Dib continued, unaware that his vindication was so close at hand.

"I'm not going to condone your picking on that child with the skin condition, Dib! He's not an alien, because there's _no_-"

* * *

"…five…"

* * *

"-_such_-"

* * *

"…four…"

* * *

"-_thing_-"

* * *

"…three…"

* * *

"-_as_-"

* * *

"…two…"

* * *

"-_ALIENS!_"

* * *

"…one…"

With a space-tearing shift, Robert Fredrickson's superluminal vessel carried him beyond the orbit of Jupiter in under a second. Back at Mission Control, everyone broke out cheering, clapping each other on the back, opening bottles of champagne with much of the same happy abandon Lemaxan, Irken, Introi, Vortian, and countless other pioneers had over the millennia. People cheered in the great squares and stadiums of the world, at home and on planes, celebrating the new technological age of humanity with much of the same happy abandon they had at New Year's, 1999. In the hospital they were staying at, Dib and Membrane heard the cheering as the staff celebrated, and Membrane realized he'd missed the event. He stood glaring at his son, daring him to give some proof, some explanation, some evidence of extraterrestrial life-

-and suddenly, every sing TV in the world switched to a different broadcast. Every set of speakers in the world stopped playing music, or the congratulations of prominent scientists. Every cell phone, I-pod, and movie screen began playing a message beamed down to them from the Natrian space fleet: A long, reptilian alien's face, saying, "_Rhi gsirh gsirmit lim?_"

To the rest of the world, this was a shock, a bug, a prank, maybe even a portent of doom, but Dib recognized the alien as Scly Evcoth, and the strange words as 'Is this thing on?'. First contact.

Dib grinned, and turned to his father. "Called it!"

* * *

Wow, I'm glad I finally updated this! It's been, what, sixty days? Fifty-seven actually...

Sorry for not updating. I don't really have an excuse. Oh, well... I'd like to thank TENNROX, one of my frequen reviewrs who, apparently, likes Tenn and CAPITAL LETTERS, for giving me this inspirational comment that got me off my lazy bum to do this chapter: 'DAMN!WOULD YOU UPDATE ALREADY!'

Kidding XD


	19. First Contact

"_Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."_

-William Shakespeare

* * *

"Is this thing on? Good. Yeah, probably should have recorded…" Scly cleared his throat, looked away from the sound technician, and spoke to all of humanity in English, "Greetings, people of the planet earth. First and foremost, I would like to advise all people with heart conditions to immediately leave the room and cover your ears. This may be a little exciting. Number two, if you are driving a car, _pull over immediately_. All boats, trains and airplanes about to launch should brake, and all those about to land should land immediately. This is first contact between humanity and an alien race, and we want this to be as safe as possible. Also, all you cultists in New Mexico who are Awaiting the Coming of the Enlightened ones to Advance Us to the Next Plane of Existence or something like that, quit calling us. We have no spiritual message for you at all. And, uh, owner of the white Sedan, you left your taillights on."

Off-screen, most of the technicians buried their face in their hands, and Reku snickered.

"I have good news and bad news," He continued, "The bad news is that you're being invaded. The good news is that it's not us doing the invading. For the past few months there has been a slow, steady infiltration of human society by a hostile alien foe. Luckily, we caught this early, and, like cancer, it should be less of a problem than it could have been. I would also like to inform the family and friends of Dib Membrane, a boy living in the Midwest, that he was right and you were wrong."

* * *

In the hospital room, Dib got up and did a victory lap, hooting like a football fan, "BOOYEAH! I KNEW IT! I KNEWIT! A DECADE OF ALIEN HUNTING _VINDICATED_! ARE YOU WATCHING THIS, ZITA? HOW 'BOUT YOU, OLD KID?"

* * *

"There are actually _two_ invasions going on right now. One of them has been largely driven by the efforts of one Irken named Zim, an exile from his own species who thinks this is his top-secret mission. You can basically ignore him."

* * *

Zim, who was watching the whole thing on TV in the living room with about twenty other Irkens, was by this point seriously pissed off. He turned to the other Irkens on his couch and said angrily, "Don't listen to him! The humans fear me! Well, if I let them know about me, they would fear me, but still, they're _hypothetically_ terrified! That counts!"

The Irkens glanced at their surroundings, the fruits of six months of invasion, and mentally racked up a point for the Dib-human.

* * *

"The second invasion, which is more of an issue, is that of a race of energy beings who, at this moment, are stationed somewhere on your planet. I can assume that they need human bodies for a planned military expedition, having none of their own, so I urge you to- _Would the nations of China, North Korea, Russia and India please stop aiming your nuclear weapons at us this instant! _Do you want an international incident here? Oh, look, here's France, joining in the fun… Oh, now the good ol' USA's joining in. Look, that's really annoying. The most you can do with those is run up the power bill on the shielding. OK, now here comes Pakistan… We have bombs too, you know, and I doubt Russia will look better for a giant crater where Moscow was- That was a _joke_!_ DO NOT LAUNCH_! Oh my God… Okay, let's run through this one more time…"

While Scly was dealing with the wonderfully interesting issues of nuclear politics (ironically, the tape of human-Introi first contact was acquired by Scly's political rivals, who played it often during his re-election campaign, right up until polls found that the clip was actually _helping_ his approval ratings. The Introi have a good sense of humor.), General Metao was reacting to the situation the way any highly disciplined Meekrob soldier would do.

"Damn it! Damn it, damn it, damn it! This was perfect! No advanced technology, six billion fleshies, no Irkens, no Planet Jackers, nothing! Three days before completion! Three!" He howled, angrily thrashing around in his office, slamming his photoelectric tentacles against the wall with the reckless abandon of a four year old in the middle of a tantrum.

The messenger who had brought him the report of the Natrian arrival cowered in the corner. Since Meekrob offices, when they existed in the physical realm, were typically bare of furniture and were simply designations of rank, he had nothing to hide behind but himself, which he nevertheless attempted to do, with surprising success. After Metao had calmed down enough to not kill the next person he looked at, he turned around and faced the hapless messenger.

"Alright, listen very carefully to what I say. We're going to have to pull out immediately. Load up as many ships as we can in ten minutes and then make a run for it. We'll at least have enough to take Irk, and after that, we can rely on the mighty Meekrob war machine to carry us through. Now go!"

* * *

Tenn was being a bit more stoic than her Meekrob counterpart, though this was more likely do to the highly intoxicating drinks currently advancing through her squeedlyspooch than any form of self-control.

Skoodge, who thought it would look bad if the Supreme Commander of the Irken Armada threw up in his club, nervously poked her. "Uh, Tenn… What are you doing?"

Tenn, who was lying face down on the bar countertop, grabbed her beverage and pulled it closer to her. "The liver ish evil. It musht be punished."

"You don't have a liver."

"Human shaying."

Skoodge nervously pulled at his suit collar, uncomfortably aware that there were giant laser cannons being aimed at them right now. "Tenn, there's kind of this whole 'war' thing going on we need you to take care of…"

"Let the Tallersh do it."

"The Tallers are bureaucrats, Tenn. You know they can't do anything."

Tenn woozily sat up straight, and fixed Skoodge with an angry glare. "I wash an _Invader_, Shkoodge. I wash gonna go to Meekrob, and then I would have invaded Meekrob, and then the Meekrob would have been begging me to shpare them, and I woulda been all 'No way, shuckers, you're Irken shlavesh now!', and I woulda got a medal, and there woulda been a parade, and I woulda retired to a comfy houshe on Irk with a penshion, but _noooo_, I just _had_ to get shome boatload of defective ShIRsh shipped to my bashe, and I don't even no _where_ that damn Megadoomer asshault mech went, and I got captured, and then you and Zim reshcued me…"

Tenn had gotten to her feet mid-rant, angrily waving the bottle in the air, when abruptly she started weeping and embraced Skoodge rocking back and forth while sobbing. "I had a _life_, damn it! I had a _career_! And now these aliens are gonna come down and kill us, and who's gonna remember Invader Tenn? Whose gonna remember how hard I tried? Whose gonna remember how hard I crammed for the final Elite test? My Cold Unfeeling Robot Arm? It got melted down for SCRAP METAL!"

Skoodge was feeling very uncomfortable at this point, and quickly tried to think of anything that might get Tenn back on her feet. It didn't have to be anything good, it just had to get her drive back, and she'd do the rest…

An idea popped into Skoodge's head. He grinned in triumph: Two birds with one stone…

"You know, Tenn, I think I know what happened to your Megadoomer…" He began, while pulling Tenn's arms away from his neck as gently as possible.

Abruptly her eyes snapped open. They were instantly focused, all signs of intoxication fading immediately. "Who?"

"Who else?"

Tenn blinked. She pulled back her hands, closed her eyes, and breathed deeply. She calmly walked towards the door, opened it, and stepped out into the hallway, pulling it shut behind her. Skoodge, realizing that he might have just killed his best for-lack-of-a-better-term-friend, decided he was going to lock himself in his room and contact the aliens to discuss defection. They seemed a lot less threatening than whatever Tenn could do.

Meanwhile, Zim was trying to contact a local television station to expose himself on-air (his ego really needed someone declaring a state of emergency over him) whilst Scly was reminding the doctors of Earth that they still had patients.

While the station manager was telling Zim to stop messing around and let him watch the broadcast, a cold, hateful voice suddenly echoed through the room. "Ahem."

The Irkens assembled on the couch turned to look at Tenn, the immediately tried to slink off and hide in the corner. Tenn was standing there, fury incarnate bottled up in a four-foot tall Irken.

Zim, being an idiot, didn't pick up on the 'I'm-going-to-kill-you-vibe' radiating off Tenn in waves, and gestured angrily at the phone. "Can you believe it? These guys don't think I'm important! FOOLS! They will suffer dearly when I am ruler of this planet…"

"Zim." Tenn said levelly, "I need to talk to you."

"What? But I'm trying to be a threat here, and… uh…" His voice faded off, realizing at last how irked (no pun intended) Tenn was.

Tenn's eyes had gained the intensity of supernovae. She pointed at the floor in front of her: "_Now_."

Zim walked out of the room slowly, cautiously studying Tenn's face for any sudden movement. "Uh, Tenn, what's wrong?" He said nervously.

"Did you receive a Megadoomer Assault Mech a few weeks ago Zim?"

Zim looked relieved. "Phew, I thought I'd done something wrong. As a matter of fact, the Almighty Tallests gave it to me in celebration of my awesome prowess as a soldier, and-"

Zim's ego was interrupted by Tenn's hands clamping down over his windpipe. "I AM GONNA KILL YOU! YOU RUINED MY LIFE AND NOW I'M STUCK ON THIS MISERABLE DIRTBALL INSTEAD OF GETTING THE GLORY FOR THE CONQUEST OF MEEKROB! CURSE YOU AND YOUR ROBOT ARM TO THE DEEPEST PIT OF THE NETHERWORLD!"

The Computer watched Tenn's transformation from stoic commander to raving lunatic with considerable pleasure, especially when she started slamming Zim so hard into the wall his eyes popped out again (Irken eyes are not well connected to their body: They consist of hardened sensory plates connected to the body only by the optic nerve. If enough force is applied to them, thy can slip right out of the eyelids and flop all around the place).

The Irkens in the other room quietly slipped out the door, along with the Irkens upstairs who teleported up to the space station, and those downstairs who retreated into the furthest corners of Skoodge's club and curled up into the fetal position. Meanwhile, Scly continued his broadcast, unaware of the chaos down below.

"We request that all humans suffering from diseases considered terminal travel to their nearest major medical center or capitol building. We have transfusions that can cure all forms of cancer you arte suffering from, as well as viral and bacterial infections, and most kinds of mental problems. Impoverished nations will be receiving aid immediately. Also, I would like to inform all world governments that you are now officially on record: It might be best to stop committing atrocities and human rights violations now, so things don't have to get ugly later. Oh, yes, and all anarchist or communist or whatever revolutionaries are out hiding in the jungle, you should also stop now, even if you think you're in the right. That concludes this broadcast, and, uh… Drive safely, I guess." And, with that, First Contact was over.

Scly turned away from the computer screen, and swallowed nervously. "How was that?"

The entire roomful of technicians looked mortified. Reku was grinning, which was an even worse sign.

"Too many jokes?"

"I think," a technician said, leaning back in his chair, "That it is safe to say that speech will be remembered for a _long _time."

Scly sighed. He really loathed politics. "Well, I think I'm going to have a twelve-hour nap after I'm done talking to the Irkens. Contact Zim's base."

* * *

Down on Earth, Tenn and Zim were working through some important psychological issues together.

"YOU SLIMY BALL OF PATHETIC DIRT!" Tenn said, slamming Zim against the wall every other syllable, both hands wrapped around his neck, "DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD I WORKED TO BRING DOWN THE MEEKROB? _DO YOU?_ WHERE'S HE MEGADOOMER, ZIM?"

Zim, his brain fuzzy from lack of oxygen, thought that Tenn might decide to let him go if he told the truth. "Hit self-destruct-ACK!-after human saw-AAH!-robot without shield-"

Tenn's grip abruptly slackened in shock, and Zim took the opportunity to slide out of her death grip and make a run for the elevator. Tenn, meanwhile, stared at the patch of air where Zim's face had been a moment before, her mouth hanging open, one eye twitching. Behind her there was an increasingly fast series of _ding_ tones as Zim frantically hit the elevator call button (the Computer kept it in the basement: This was too much fun to watch).

Tenn slowly turned around. "You blew it up?" She said, the look of disbelief in her eyes rapidly turning into anger. "You blew up four thousand year's worth of Irken technical expertise, a next-generation prototype cloaking array, and enough firepower for even an idiot like you to conquer this miserable spinning ball of dirt, because a _human saw it_?"

Zim swallowed. "Um… It was the Dib-monkey who saw it…" He said, hoping it would help.

Tenn grabbed a chair, and lifted it over her head. It didn't.

The Computer received a transmission from the aliens about thirty seconds later, but decided not to report. He was watching Tenn twist Zim into a pretzel-shaped ball of pain, and you simply don't interrupt an artist at work.

* * *

Back on the Natrian spaceship, Scly was beginning to wonder what was taking the Irkens so long to respond, when one of the technicians informed him that there was a small spaceship attempting to dock with the flagship.

"And who do they identify themselves as?" He asked in a monotone. He had reached a level of tiredness that he had never even approached in his entire life: Juggling three wars, filing reports to the politicians back home, leading military expeditions to backwater planets in far-off galaxies… It took lot out of a guy.

"Um… She identifies herself as N-Labs Head of Research Naida Entorro, and she has also just gotten onto the ship without any approval code. Now she's advancing towards the bridge… Do you know this person?"

Before he had the chance to respond, the bridge doors slid open, and immediately the entire crew flinched and tried to look as inconspicuous as possible. Few things are more frightening than a furious, two hundred and fifty pound carnivore. Naida Entorro was one of them.

"I am looking for a Mr. Scly Phoi Evcoth." She said, holding up the damning sheet of earthly genetic codes.

The entire crew, being loyal to the Empire and the High Council in the utmost degree, collectively pointed at Scly. Scly merely raised his hand. "Did you bring coffee?"

"How can you talk about coffee at a time like this! You kept this entire planet secret from me!"

"Nevertheless, did you bring coffee?"

"No, as a matter of fact, I did not."

"Then I really don't have a reason to be talking to you right now."

And with that, Scly turned around and tried to ignore Naida's cries of outrage.

"How can you just ignore me like that? I flew across the entire universe to get here!"

"So you could complain."

"Scly, we're _partners_ here. I have to do all the work at the labs because you're wrapped up in silly politics?"

"It's not silly to thirty billion voters. Besides, what other politician would be better at my job? They're _politicians_: You can't trust them with something as important as government. Like it or not, I'm the high Council member, and I can't run N-Labs anymore."

"Did you just try to pull rank on me?" Naida demanded marching across the room. "Did you just pull rank on the person you owe five hundred and twenty six Nicros in restaurant bills to? Did you pull rank on the person who loaned you her textbook so your biology teacher wouldn't take it off your grade?"

"Yes." Scly said, without looking away from the screen. "I did. Please leave the premises ma'am: We're in the middle of diplomatic relations with a hostile alien force, and we wouldn't want to get a civilian in harm's way."

"So you want me to go back and do _your_ job when you're withholding information from me? Look at this!" She shoved a packet of paper under Scly's nose. "An entire _planet_'s worth of new genetic material. Why didn't you tell me about this? This is serious stuff!"

Scly turned to face her angrily. "Exactly! Serious stuff! Earth was a pre-spaceflight planet in the middle of a war zone! We couldn't let word get out it _existed_, or some evil army of aliens would be all over it in hours. Of course I couldn't give you the information! Nobody could have gotten the information!"

"You just made first contact! Is that planet anywhere near ready for alien intervention? This is not how we do it, Scly. We sit and we wait and we study. We do not intervene, because if we do then rich aliens from all over the universe will buy up the entire planet for the 'advanced technology' in their wristwatch. The humans won't be able to cope!"

"Human technology has advanced significantly in recent years thanks to the efforts of Professor Membrane, Any remaining difference in technology levels is going to disappears after a few months of tourism and exporting human food to restaurants in the Empire. They can handle it. Besides, I waited until they broke light speed. That's the official limit. We watched and we waited and we studied-"

"And part of studying is having people there to study! You cut out the most advanced research firm in the universe because of 'National Security'!"

Reku, meanwhile had taken control of the ship, and was directing orders to the technicians.

"You see? They really _do _sound like an old married couple." He said to one of the senor operators.

He laughed, turned back to his monitor, and promptly stopped laughing. "Sir," he said, "I'm pickling up multiple ships, each about a mile long, lifting off in major earth cities. I think the Meekrob are making a run for it. Should we alert Council Member Evcoth?"

Reku glanced at Scly and Naida, whose argument had devolved into the all-too-familiar 'I'm louder than you!' stage.

"…Nah…"

* * *

Phew! There it is. It's sort of like the mail: It make take a long time (you might even be dead when it gets there), but it comes through eventually!

Sorry about the wait guys. I know how annoying it gets checking every day for updates. You should expect the next one sometime in December.


	20. Therapy

"_The most interesting aspect of exobiology, in my opinion, are the numerous similarities encountered in organisms that developed on completely different planets. This is most obvious in major body structures, examples of convergent evolution. The uninitiated or newcomers to biology will complain that they have nothing in common with other species from their own planet, much less humans, Aurus, Introi, and Irkens. However, if you look past the superficial differences, you'll notice some key facts: All the aforementioned organisms have skeletons, brains, blood (or a blood equivalent), limbs, lungs, eyes, and so on. This is because the pressures on an evolving animal are essentially the same from planet to planet: There is no better way of seeing than an eye, no better way of moving than a limb, no gas better for breathing than oxygen. Even Irkens, who breathe Nitrogen as opposed to Oxygen, share these major similarities. At the biochemical level, we see that Aurus and humans are essentially the same, that certain enzymes in Introi cells, vital to the processing of ATP, is shockingly similar to earthly caffeine, that Na-3Cl-5 is just a phosphate group and some spare atoms attached to a salt crystal, and so on. To me, this means one of three things: Random Coincidence, Galactic Conspiracy, or God having a laugh by messing with our heads."_

-Scly Evcoth, in one of his lectures at Plyn City University.

* * *

Dib's initial euphoria of vindication had faded, to be replaced by the righteous suppressed anger he felt towards his father. He was sitting on the operating table again, arms folded, the wound on his leg as red and incriminating as ever. Membrane, for his part, was deep in a silent mire of confusion and horror in the realization of what, for the past ten or so years, he had been doing.

The room remained silent as the painful seconds dragged on, Dib growing increasingly furious at his father's speechlessness, and Membrane just trying to make sense of what his world had devolved into. This was his ultimate nightmare: Proven wrong hundreds of times over, missing the most important scientific event in his life because his son was in the hospital, being effectively upstaged by aliens hundreds of years ahead of anything he had ever worked on, and, worst of all, Dib was vindicated.

_Listen to yourself!_ His conscience screamed at him, _All this going on and all you can focus on is that your son was _right_? Dib's right, Membrane, you are one awful father._

Dib was too full of fury to get a coherent thought together, but he strongly suspected that if things continued like this he would snap and resort to violence.

The silent, dysfunctional family moment was interrupted by a doctor knocking on the door. Dib's nervous doctor from before walked in, clutching his clipboard to his chest like a shield. "Mr. Membrane, sir-"

"That's his _first_ name." Dib snapped jabbing a thumb at his mute father. "I don't like being called it."

The poor man shuffled his feet anxiously. "Well, sir, we have some… visitors who came asking for a Dib Membrane, and you were the… uh…"

The long reptilian snout of an Introi poked into the room, casing the doctor to make a small noise of terror and back away. "Sir, High Council Member Evcoth has requested your presence aboard his ship. Will you be joining him?"

Dib nodded and got up.

"Is there anything you'd like to deal with before leaving the planet, sir? You may not be returning for some time."

Dib cast a glance back at his father, then looked back at the soldier. "No. There's nothing here for me."

And that may have been how Membrane and Dib's relationship ended that night, had the Professor not remembered his late wife at the moment. The wonderful, caring person able to tear him away from his precious experiments, who loved their children so much that it forced him to be there for them too. The woman who had made him vow the day Dib was born to always put his family first. The rising, inescapable wave of guilt of that broken promise…

"No! This is not the end!"

Dib turned back towards his father, and saw him on his feet, determined, back straight as a ruler as he made that statement that so needed saying.

"Dib, you said I ignored you and your sister for years. Well, I have! I've been hiding from you! I admit that I've been horrible about raising you kids. I admit that I thought I could stay away and live in my own little world! And you know why, Dib? I was _scared of you_!"

The Introi pulled the doctor out of the room and shut the door, leaving the two of them alone for a few moments of shocked silence. Dib blinked, unable to say anything more than a stammering "Wh-What?"

"I was scared of you two! I was _terrified_! I'd never been a father before, and now my wife was gone, and there were two little, wonderful miracles of intelligence looking up at me, expecting me to raise them! Do you know what it's like to be a father, to have created these thinking, living things, capable of everything you are, feeling what you feel, knowing what you know? Having brought them into the world? And the greatest terror I ever felt, Dib, was that I knew I would mess it up somehow, turn that little miracle into a curse. I thought I could let nannies and Skool handle your moral upbringing, and the only aspect of parenthood I thought I had down was financial support. That's why I left, Dib. I was weak. I couldn't handle it."

Dib began to cry, and was immediately horrified that he was doing so in front of his father, adding a new layer of emotional turmoil onto the situation. "But, whenever you _did_ talk to me it was always crushing the paranormal sciences! You were enough of a parent to teach me about that?"

"Dib… It wasn't Bigfoot or aliens or the Loch Ness Monster at first… It was ghosts… You loved ghosts first, and I tried to stamp them and anything that followed out of your mind because… because… I thought you were trying to get your mother back. When she died, Dib, I admit that I felt helpless enough to go see mediums and fortune tellers, even a Haitian witch doctor. I was horrified by all that because I was worried you'd never let go."

Membrane suddenly broke down crying as well, and, sinking to his knees, embraced his son. For the first time in years, Dib felt the wonderful release of real happiness wash over him.

"I'm sorry… I'm sorry…" Membrane said, trying to retain enough composure to stay upright, "I've ruined your life twice now… I'll make it up to you in whatever time we have left. Let me come with and help you with those aliens, son. I can work with them, understand their technology, it doesn't all have to rest on you this time."

"No, Dad, thanks but… This is my job, you know? I'm going to go help the aliens, but Earth needs you. We'll both do what we're good at. You just help humanity and Gaz and I'll go defeat the Irkens." Dib said, smiling a bit and holding back the tears for some other time.

"Yes… It's for the best… I love you, son."

"I know Dad. I always loved you back, no matter what a pain you were."

They laughed, shared a parting hug, and Dib walked out into the hallway, casting a teary smile and a wave back to his father before he left. The Introi nodded at him, then fell into pace beside him. "How are you feeling, sir?"

Dib smiled. "Better."

They walked out to the landing craft the soldier had taken down to the planet, and were just taking off when the quakes started.

* * *

It happened simultaneously, all over the world: The ground shook violently, a terrible screeching noise tore through the air, and massive, silver discs rose out of the ground and hovered to the center of any metropolitan area with a population of more than three million. Meekrob war cruisers.

Some people believed the end had finally come, some cults in Arizona clung to the notion that this was their Deliverance to the Ninth Ring of the Astral Planes, and some simply fainted. What they did was meaningless in the end: The Meekrob simply extended ramps towards the ground, opened the hatches, and let loose with the mind control. Immediately, every man, woman and child within range stopped what they were doing and started marching, silently, eyes staring straight ahead for the nearest loading ramp.

When they got there, healthy, young adults were immediately moved into positions of precedence in the line to board, while the older, younger, or infirm remained on the sidelines. It was the most horrifyingly massive display of mass mind-control in the history of the worlds.

Metao was rather proud of it.

Of course, they had to take off almost immediately, leaving most of their potential hosts on the ground, but it didn't matter. He had an army. Soon, the Irkens would pay for their insolence, but not at the hands of a Meekrob army, no way Metao would waste that, but at the hands of a never-ending tide of human foot soldiers. It was brilliant, and it would catapult the Meekrob to overlordship of the galaxy.

However, there was one prize he wanted in particular among the seething masses of humanity. One individual who would prove especially useful to their conquest. While the people who got onto the ships in other cities were more or less random, Metao knew he simply _had_ to get that one. Not to worry, though: He put the entire ship over his house, didn't he?

* * *

"That thing's floating over my house!" Dib yelled abruptly, shocked to see that the massive disc had moved over his neighborhood, and had extended one of its boarding ramps down to his front lawn. Recovering from the most emotionally chaotic night of his life as he was, he still felt the shock of recognizing his home from the air, thousands of his annoying neighbors shuffling up the ramps, little smudges against the flood lamps on the ship.

"What are you guys doing there? Why are you getting people onto the ships?"

"_Us_? Didn't you see the broadcast? That's the _Meekrob_ down there, the bad guys. Command says they're kidnapping humans for human hosts in their campaign. They have one of those spaceships in every major city on the planet."

Dib sank into a chair in horror, realizing that after months of fighting Zim, opposing him at every turn, enduring the ridicule and scorn of his fellow humans, some other species of aliens had just come in and invaded without breaking a sweat. He had to stop this, somehow, he had to do something…

One of the soldiers escorting him into space came over to the window and looked out at the ship. "That's… strange. They must really want someone living over there, or they'd put it in the middle of the city like the other ones. This probably cuts the turnout for this city in half."

"It's my dad." Dib said numbly, unable to fully grasp the enormity of the situation, "He's the only one who'd be able to mobilize some sort of resistance against them. They're trying to get him quickly before they have to leave. Good thing he's on the other side of the city."

The ship they were in climbed steadily higher into the air, until the ship shrank down to a little silvery speck and the city lay unfolded like a giant glowing map beneath them. Further out, and he could see the river, attracting lumps of glowing light denoting towns and small cities like flypaper. Further out, Lake Superior appeared far to the north and a crescent of blackness appeared on the edge of the world. Higher and higher they climbed, until the crescent grew to encircle the whole disc of the world Dib saw below him, dotted with stars. Further still, and dib saw, for the second time in his life, the glory of the undiluted cosmos. The sun shone brightly behind the brilliant ball of the earth, the moon hung in space like a galactic ping-pong ball, and the stars shone, unthinking and undimmed in the void of the universe. Despite all the chaos happening down below, it was all peace up here. The stars would shine forever out here, no matter who owned them.

Dib was aware that, just a few hours ago, he would have been overwhelmingly cynical at the beautiful sight, and probably disgusted with himself for being so corny. Though his subconscious had healed enough for him to appreciate it, the tiny bit of scorn he couldn't help feeling jarred him back to reality: This was _war_. Time to get a move on and get even with Zim. He walked towards the front of their craft, and saw the soft white hull of the Natrian cruiser that had brought the aliens here, with the smooth, streamlined, aerodynamic shape the Introi obsessive-compulsively incorporated into a design that would not travel through air.

They docked quickly, and Dib, regaining his composure, marched with his escort to the bridge of the station, ready to pledge everything he had to the cause of saving humanity. It was at that point that Naida threw a coffeepot, which he had to duck to avoid.

* * *

"You self-righteous, arrogant little twit!" She yelled, "I should have listened to my mother, gotten that architecture degree, but _no_, I just _had_ to work in the fascinating field of biotechnology! And when esteemed scientist Scly Evcoth offers me a lab position, I don't even think about it, I just get all excited to be working with such an _intelligent _individual, and next thing you know I'm bringing him coffee from halfway across the universe!"

"I'd like to point out that you didn't actually bring me any coffee," Scly retorted, "And that I personally engineered _twice _the species you ever did! I filled every niche on Myrtyr without any of your help, Miss Self-Importance!"

"That doesn't change the fact that you're an idiot!"

"Yes, ma'am, I am an idiot, an idiot indeed. I also got a eighty-twenty majority in the running for the High Council! I got billions of people to vote me into a position of supreme power. Computer, please refresh my memory and tell me how many votes Naida Entorro received in the election."

The computer responded to Scly's question in a mechanical monotone. "Ms. Naida Entorro did not run in any election, and therefore received no votes."

"IN YOUR FACE!"

"I would like to point out that, since whenever the denominator and numerator match the product is one, and I received zero out of zero votes, I got a hundred percent of the votes."

"That's idiotic!"

"I suppose you would know, seeing as you're an idiot. Isn't division by zero equal to multiplication by infinity?"

"Yes, but zero times by anything is still zero!"

"Zero out of zero. One hundred percent. I win!"

"Yeah, well, your- Oh hello Dib." Scly and Naida suddenly broke off the argument and turned to smile nicely at Dib. "Dib Membrane, Naida Entorro; Naida Entorro, Dib Membrane."

"Charmed." Dib said, shaking Naida's hand, not bothering to point out it wasn't his last name.

"Likewise." Naida said, then turned back to scream at Scly.

Dib shuffle over to Reku Lyti, the only other person here he sort-of knew, and tapped his shoulder. "Is there something I'm missing here? What's going on?"

"Government in action."

"More like government inaction."

Reku sniggered. 'That's a good one, I have to write it down. Basically, Scly and Naida yell at each other when they're stressed. It's good for them."

"This is _good_? I'd hate to see bad."

"Bad is when they are very calm and polite to each other. Whenever they act like professionals, you know something is very wrong. These are two very insane people here. They're practically married, but neither of them has caught on that there is any attraction there."

"Platonic romance?"

"If Plato was entirely unaware that the opposite gender existed in any meaningful way, then yes."

Reku said these last comments loud enough to work their convoluted way into Scly's head, and he whirled around to yell at them. "You're not being very helpful here, Reku! You know what! ? _You know what! ?_"

"What?" Reku said calmly.

Scly abruptly whipped his head around to face Naida, then extended it suddenly so that their heads touched side-by-side. Dib didn't get it at first, but his implant informed him this was the Introi equivalent of kissing. Naida, for her part, looked simply stunned.

Scly pulled his head back, looked her in the eye, and said. "You are a wonderful person who I admit I'm attracted to."

He then turned to face Reku. "Happy now? So, seeing as you can finally shut up about it, I'm going to go save that species of monkeys the alien ghosts are kidnapping."

And with that, he left the room.

Reku was as stunned, if not more so, as Naida, and didn't say something stupid like 'Will you name your oldest son after me?'. Naida just stood there for a few seconds, mouth agape, before she closed it, swallowed, and exited the room, blushing to the tips of her wings.

Knowing what utter silence did to people, Dib cleared his throat and asked, "Can I have some of that coffee?"

* * *

Wow… That book was a lot more sentimental than I expected. Probably would have disgusted Jhonen too, but what the hell. It's my story. I thought I should get rid of some of our heroes' emotional baggage as we close in on the end.

And yes, folks, the end is coming! Expect about four fairly long chapters to wrap things up. Onwards, to chapter 21!


	21. Proposals and Retreats

"_Shall I compare thee to a summer's day… Especially those ones in the middle of August when it's all sticky and mosquitoes appear in droves to suck your blood and your entire lawn is brown and dying and some people pass out from heat exhaustion and the air conditioning is broken and then there's a blackout and all your neighbors pretend to like you so they can use your pool… yeah…"_

-Varr Macai, Introi poet, on romance.

* * *

There are several things to be said about the Irken body: It was resilient, efficient, and, as the Computer was discovering to his immense enjoyment, able to make all sorts of popping noises as it was painfully twisted around.

"Now," Tenn said, Zim whimpering on the floor as she twisted his hand about ninety degrees farther than it should have gone, "Since you've had time to think about your actions, what do you have to say for yourself?"

"I'm sorry, Ms. Tenn."

"Should you have used the Megadoomer?"

"No, Ms. Tenn."

"And what will you do if you receive a Megadoomer in the future?"

"Send it back, Ms. Tenn."

"Okay. I accept your apology."

Tenn let go of Zim, who slumped into a quivering mass of pain, and turned to look at one of the Computer's optical sensors. "Did I miss anything?"

"The alien situation, ma'am." The computer responded, his voice ringing with electronic awe at the beating she had just given Zim.

Tenn sighed. "Right, that. Take the elevator to the communications room."

She popped the lid on the trashcan (she didn't feel like using the toilet elevator right now), and rode down to deal with the Natrians.

The room was quiet for several long moments, Zim slowly tried to pull himself to his feet.

"Dude," he Computer said, dropping any pretense of addressing Zim as a superior, "She beat the _crap_ out of you."

Zim made a little gurgling sound, and managed to get into a chair.

"I mean," he continued, "It's bad enough you're in deep physical agony right now, but she's a _girl_."

Zim grunted in response, head face-down on the table.

"If I were an _Invader_ and a _girl_ beat me up in _my own base_, wow, I'd probably be feeling really emasculated and have deeply-scarring self-confidence issues for years to come-"

"Go away!" Zim whined.

The Computer turned off the speakers and focused more of his attention to what was happening elsewhere in the base, but he kept at least one processor devoted to enjoying Zim's pain. So far, it was turning out to be the greatest day in his non-life.

* * *

"So…" Reku said, "Shall we proceed with the diplomacy?"

"Yes." Tenn said quietly. Her adrenaline rush from beating the stuffing out of Zim had faded, and now she was faced with the grim reality of her situation: A hostile and extremely powerful alien force had them surrounded. Even if they could somehow get all the Irkens in the base up to the space station before the teleportation lines were cut, they would have to fire up their ships, a process that would take several minutes, and then try to find some way of counteracting whatever formations the Natrians had had plenty of time to make. Even if they could get their ships in fighting condition, too many of them were damaged to do anything to help. They were screwed.

"Standard diplomatic format or 'no B.S.' format?" Reku asked.

Tenn smiled grimly. She liked 'no B.S.' format. That wasn't much consolation right now, but you take what you can get.

"Okay, basically we have every advantage on you in space. All our ships are at the ready, all of them are in working order, blah, blah, blah. We're locked in geosynchronous orbit so you can't use the rotation to get away, the nearest Irken fleet is a galaxy over. You can't get off that planet."

"Ah, but would a siege work?" She responded, "You must be stretched for resources. The faster you get out of here, the easier the war will go. You can't invade the base: Miles and miles of underground networks only we know the schematics for, thousands of hostiles fighting for their lives, a practically infinite supply of food and energy-"

"Yeah, I get it. We can't invade your base-"

Tenn's face lit up with a flash of hope.

"-So we'll have to use an orbital laser strike."

Despondency again. If the Natrians fired naval-class heavy lasers at the base, they'd be done for.

"We present you with two options: Surrender or end up in a little puddle of radioactive goop."

Tenn laughed. "We're the Irken Elite, sir. We'd rather die than betray the Empire."

"And how are you going to help the Empire down there? If you agree to become our prisoners, it'll take us longer to get back to the front. We'll have more mouths to feed, more ships we can't expose to danger, and you might still be able to escape at some point. Take advantage of our moral obligation to let you surrender: Being a POW and useless is better than being _dead_ and useless."

Tenn sighed. All in all it was a good offer, but…

She looked down at the little golden sticker Lir had given her to signify her command over the Fleet. A Commander of the Irken Empire _surrendering_?

She sighed. You gotta do what you gotta do.

* * *

Lir and Vem, meanwhile, were fleeing for their lives. They rocketed through the streets, not caring about disguises or subtlety. They had to get off-planet _now._ They shot over Dib's fence, their Imperial-issue hover belts whirring like crazy, and smacked face-first into an invisible turtle.

Vem curled up on the ground, cursing like a sailor, while Lir just stared blankly at all the sky, wondering why their were suddenly twice as many stars.

The turtle turned visible a second later, and Helen stuck her head out. Vem quickly recovered, and pulled Lir to his feet.

"Helen," she said, "We've gotta get out of here. How soon can you take off?"

"In time or space?"

"Can you evade the Natrian Armada while still staying in the same time?"

Helen snorted. "Of course! Why the big hurry, anyways?"

"We're _Tallers_! As soon as they get down here, will be their first targets! If the Tallests are dead, that means _I'm_ Tallest," she shuddered a little at the thought, "And as soon as they off me _Lir's_ Tallest!" This frightened her to the point of nausea, and she let her face fall into her hands as she moaned a long string of Irken curse words.

"I'm sure nobody wants that. Come aboard, I'll wake Raj up."

They entered the turtle, Vem spiraling into a panic attack, Lir eyeing the control board with interest.

"How hard do you think it is to figure out how to work this thing?"

"Don't even think about it." Raj said sleepily as he walked into the room. There were bags under his eyes, and he was still wearing his nightclothes (not that either Irken could tell).

"So," He said, rubbing his hands together, "Alien invasion, hmm? Where shall we go?"

"How about Byzantium?" Helen suggested, "It's going to be absolutely lovely there in a month or two."

Lir frowned. "Byzantium?"

Raj nodded. "But now it's called Istanbul."

"Not Constantinople?"

Raj shook his head. "Istanbul: Not Constantinople."

"Istanbul. Not Constantinople." Lir repeated for clarity.

Vem groaned. "It's nobody's business but the Turks'! Can we just get out of here?"

"How about Irk?" Raj said.

Vem was suddenly very focused, and very, very angry. "Raj," She said, "How long have we been able to go to Irk?"

"Pretty much the entire time. Why?"

Vem screamed her rage to the heavens, then collapsed onto a chair. "Never mind. Just go."

And with that, the Tallers were finally headed home.

* * *

Aboard the Natrian command ship, Scly and Naida were sharing some coffee (turns out she had brought some after) as they stared at the bluish-white glow shining from the fusion reactor.

"So…" Scly said, "Guess we're a 'couple' now."

"Right." Naida said, "Even though we're practically married already. God, this means we have to start dating."

Scly snorted. "_Start_? We've eaten dinner together three nights out of five for the past year."

"Yeah, but that wasn't _dating_."

"What's the difference?"

"We split the bill, for one thing."

They laughed a little, then resumed their contemplative stares into the light.

"You know…" Scly said, adopting the matter-of-fact tone of voice that had been used for most of their 'romance' so far, "If you think of all those dinners in a romantic context, we really are almost married. If I were to propose to you right now, give me a rough estimate of whether or nor you'd say yes. Not that I'm proposing."

Naida furrowed her eyebrows in thought for a few moment, then responded in the same tone, "About eighty-five percent chance of a yes. What are the odds of you proposing? Not that I'm asking you to propose."

"Seventy-five," Scly responded, setting his coffee down on the railing, "Not tonight, though. I mean, first I'd have to go get a ring and then I'd pick some night that wasn't already so stressful, and then I'd have to sit through dinner or something trying to avoid chickening out, but probably after this whole mess is over. Tell you what, I'll propose on the day hostilities cease. How's that?"

"It's a date. Not that I'm accepting your proposal, by the way."

"Not that I'm proposing."

Scly turned and started to walk away, when suddenly he turned back around. "Say, Naida?"

She craned her head around. "Yeah?"

Scly spread his wings out to face away from his body, the Introi equivalent of kneeling, and produced a box with two golden engagement rings inside. "You wanna get married?"

She blinked. "You serious?"

"Sure."

There was a moment of silence. Naida slowly set down her coffee on the railing, next to Scly's, turned to face him, and folded her arms. "You little _tvai_. You know what a lousy proposal story I'm going to have to make up for the kids?"

Scly shrugged. "I figured I should make it a surprise."

Another moment of silence, and then Naida's face broke into a huge grin, she leapt forward and embraced Scly, who laughed and hugged her back. "Yes, you idiot, of course!" She said, laughing and crying a little, "By the stars, Scly, don't do that! You almost gave me a heart attack!"

"You almost gave me one when you mentioned kids," Scly joked, "One step at a time, Ms. Entorro."

Naida made a little subdued screaming noise as she remembered her rings, then quickly slipped them over her second pair of limbs. "Oh, these look spectacular! Where are they from?"

"Myrtyr," Scly responded, "I was passing through and I thought, 'Hey, I might need really expensive engagement rings at some point in the future', so here they are. I'm glad you like them."

"Another thing we can't tell our children. I swear, if one of them tries to pull a stunt like this on a girl, I'm gonna-"

"Again with the children! We don't even have names for them yet."

"Yes we do," She responded, staring fixedly at her rings as she twisted them to catch the light. "One of my children is going to be a Varr, and if it's a girl-"

"Not Varr." Scly said in a tone of annoyance. "There were a million Varrs."

"Five hundred years ago!"

"Exactly! It's the perfect combination of too common and too obscure. I want a Vinnis."

"Assuming we have a girl. I don't care for that name at all anyways."

"You assumed we'd have a boy."

"Tell you what," Naida said, "Instead of working out some prudent compromise, let's name our children by taking turns."

"Fair enough. How do we pick who goes first?"

"If it's a boy I'll name him Varr, if it's a girl you can name her Vinnis. Then we switch."

"Hey!" Scly said, his face lighting up with realization, "We can give our kids a really annoying naming scheme and give them all first names starting with V. That way, when someone tries to put them on a list, they'll all come up as 'V. Evcoth'!"

"And why would we want to do that?"

Scly shrugged. "It's funny. _You're _the one who suggested we don't use a prudent compromise."

"You agreed!"

And with that, they launched into the first of their many arguments as a couple. They would remember it for years with nostalgia, and they never quite topped it for epic scope and enjoyment.

* * *

Back at the base, Tenn was giving her speech to the assembled Irken army. That she had to use the nightclub (it was the only stage large enough) did nothing to mitigate how morose a speech it was.

"My fellow soldiers… I am sorry to say that we have no way out of this. The Empire is great, mighty and invulnerable, but we were unfortunate enough to be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. The enemy caught us off-guard with a deceptive and honorless sneak attack, and what is left of the fleet is simply incapable of resisting any longer. I have received a message from Taller Vem, and I want to reassure you that both she and Taller Lir have escaped safely. We cannot do anything here but slow down our enemy and tax their resources, and the only way to do that is to become their prisoners. Yes, it is a surrender. I will not mince words with you. But it is the best course of action, both for us and for the Empire. And it is possible, nay, it is _certain_, that the Empire will turn the tide and reclaim all of its former territories, along with whatever planets our despicable foes managed to colonize on their own. On that day, the empire will at last reclaim you, her lost children, and you will be honored and thanked for the sacrifices you made while suffering the indignity and humiliation of capture. May Irk on high stand by you, may he guard you against their lies, and may you never forget what it means to be an Irken! Remember who you are! Remember your _identity_!"

The crowd roared its approval, daring the invaders to take away their history, their culture, their lives. Little did they know that within an hour of boarding the ship, each and every one of them would be able to truly realize what that identity was, and turn on it in an instant.

For now, though, there was nothing but the cheering of the crowd, an echo of patriotism and sacrifice that will always be noble, irrespective of the cause it is for. They believed they were in the right, a belief they would continue to hold ardently within their hearts… For the next fifty-two minutes.

Zim, meanwhile, was working his way backstage, and managed to be right by Tenn as she left the stage.

"Tenn!" He hissed, "We gotta-"

"Look, Zim, I'm really not in the mood right now." She said, dismissing him with a wave of her hand. Knowing Zim, he was probably asking her to apologize for beating him up.

"No, Tenn, you don't understand: I have a way off-planet."

Tenn turned to face him, her face in a skeptical frown. "How?"

"Look, I was in contact with the Natrians before the war. I found out, with my amazing super-spy skills, that they were planning to invade. The Tallest's must have misplaced my warnings or something- anyways, while I was on their homeworld, I was captured temporarily, and then I woke up back at home a day later. Those snotty ingrates fixed up the Voot to show off, but they left two valuable assets inside."

Tenn was interested now. "And they are?"

"One of them was a nice tree-shaped plastic thingy that makes the Voot smell like pine needles-very refreshing smell-and the other I discovered on the Voot's computer: When they were running a virus scan on the computer to show off, the Voot was automatically registered with a code for the Natrian military database. We have a Natrian-approved identifier tag to get past the blockade."

Tenn nodded, thinking rapidly, "Okay, maybe I can figure out a way to stall for time, and we can use the code to sneak as many shiploads of Irkens past the blockade as possible, dump them on mars, and then, when the aliens realize we've been escaping, there'll be a lot less-"

"Tenn," Zim said quietly, "It won't work more than once. As soon as we get close to the blockade, the ships will be able to very plainly see that we're Irkens, and then there's only a small window of opportunity to escape. We can't even put a full shipload of Irkens on their as it is: It'd be too risky to weight the ship down with multiple passengers. Only the two of us can get out of here, and the only reason I'm coming is because you don't know how to fly the Voot."

Tenn suddenly felt very tired. She had been consigned to her fate at the hands of the Natrians, but now she had to come up with a new plan, new decisions, more guilt… Wait.

"Zim, did you just say you wouldn't be coming with if I could fly the Voot? You'd sacrifice _yourself_ to increase my chances of getting away?"

Zim realized the magnitude of what he'd just said. His eyes widened, his mouth fell open partway, and yet he still couldn't shake the knowledge that he'd give himself up in a squeedlyspoochbeat to save Tenn.

"Of… Of course…" he said numbly, his brain reeling with confusion, "You're… you're more important than me…" He felt dizzy, the world spinnig around him, and he sunk to the floor, holding his head as he felt his ideas of the universe shatter. There it was, written on the very fabric of the universe, immutable and unchanging: _Tenn is more important than Zim_.

Tenn, who only saw Zim sink to the floor and start hyperventilating, felt her cheeks blush as she realized how highly Zim valued her to say that. She helped him to his feet, and led the way to the elevator.

* * *

Another one down!

Revising my statement from last time, I think I'll be drawing out the ending into more than four chapters. Also, I just found out that in chapter 19, I wrote 'comfortable' instead of 'uncomfortable'. I'd like to revise that now: That was NOT a moment between Skoodge and Tenn.

Onwards, to 22!


	22. Shock 'n Roll

"_Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window."_

-Steve Wozinak

* * *

"So…" Dib said, following Reku into the depths of the ship, "Where exactly are we going?"

"Scly's lab. You should get to see it as long as you're on board."

The ship they were currently on was big, but nowhere near the size of the _Victory_ or _Massive_. Scly hadn't set up a permanent lab here, but he always made sure to never leave home without one: He essentially had a mobile-home spaceship, where he slept, ate, and did unnatural things to the fabric of life in his free time. This way, even when he had to leave his main labs back on Introa, he could work on his projects and stave off insanity for another day.

They arrived in the hangar, and Reku gestured towards a somewhat-triangular spaceship, narrowing to a point at the cockpit, engines in the back, all done in the smooth, streamlined Introi style. Reku quickly punched in a password on a control panel on the bottom of the ship, and a ramp slid down al spacey-style. Reku rubbed his wings together in anticipation, and led Dib up into the ship, sliding open a large door just inside and revealing-

Oh, wow.

Dib had some idea of what to expect, as his father was a scientist as well. And, true, Scly's lab did look something like Professor Membrane's: Cluttered, complicated, lots of experiments in various stages of completion. But Professor Membrane usually worked with inorganic things like computers and robots, and his research was mainly into the practical application of physics. Scly's focus was so… _biological_.

It was a long hall lit by soft white light, and a floor made of some shiny black metal. Beyond that Dib couldn't tell, because every square inch of space was taken up by tanks, terrariums, computer consoles, test tubes, and any number of shelves and containers full of chemicals. The experiments themselves were all small, no bigger than a few feet long, but they were all doing bizarre little things: There was a lizard that puffed up a glowing throat sac, a frog that could sprout wings, a fish that could only survive in zero-gravity and looked like a blimp made out of spider webs. There were hundreds of test tubes with small little embryos growing in them, all of them the results of Scly's incessant tampering. A partially opened cabinet held vacuum-sealed boxes of plant spores and bacteria, while four doors led off this central hallway into big rooms where small biomes were under construction, little slices of prairie, jungle, ocean, and one locked one with FAILURES written on it.

"Geez…" Dib murmured, staring at the little plant that excreted sulfur, "Scly's just… messed up. Brilliant, but messed up. How can he do this all day? Doesn't it freak him out?"

Reku shook his head as he entered various passcodes into the locked door. "No. Artists paint pretty weird stuff, and _they_ don't go crazy. As far as Scly is concerned, he's playing with legos. Oh, he knows, in one way or another, that he's tampering with the most fundamental, basic aspects of existence, and he's careful because of that, but he's also got this wide-eyed wonder to it all that freaks people out. You think it'd be his birthday? No, that's to obvious."

Dib, choosing to ignore his guide's repeated attempts at breaking and entering, looked at another bizarre little animal that appeared to have two heads. "What I wouldn't have given to show this place to my dad a few days ago… I mean, I get the whole 'For Science!' motivation for tampering, but why with _living_ things? Why doesn't he get involved with quantum physics or something? Why not regular physics?"

"Because, to an Introi, _that's_ what's unnatural. You know where you are when you deal with animals, and they're, you know, familiar. Unliving, soulless physics never appealed to them."

"Oh, come on. Every culture has to have its _Frankenstein_."

"Yes, but in the Introi version it's about a mad scientist who tears a whole in the universe and blows himself up. And it's not fiction, it really happened about two hundred years ago. The Introi know what they're doing with biological tampering, and they are neither stupid or foolish enough to create a sentient being. Humans 'grew up', culturally speaking, an a dry, hot plain in eastern Africa ill-suited to agriculture. To conquer nature there meant using spears, knives, fire, all sorts of _physical_ weapons, to kill and eat the dangerous animals surrounding them. The Introi, on the other hand, 'grew up' in a deep crack in the ground, filled with a shallow pond of stagnant water, plants and reeds growing everywhere, so many species of insects, amphibians, reptiles, and the occasional mammal it would make your head spin. And the Introi were at the top, the very pinnacle of the food chain, which basically gave them access to everything in the ecosystem. So they captured and domesticated plants and animals, started naming and categorizing everything they could. They developed agriculture obscenely early in their development, but got around to computers much later. Humans developed using their unliving, physical weapons to protect themselves from nature, but Introi, who never feared nature, used it just to make themselves comfortable. This room, everything in it? It's freaky to you and me, but to them its just another instance of a cultural trend that began fourteen thousand years ago."

Dib whistled, staring at all of Scly's little creations, wondering how many ways a species could develop, how basic to their thinking could that development be…

"Is that how Scly figured out the Irkens?"

Reku smiled. "Exactly. He worked out how such a famously egotistical species like the Irkens were willing to completely surrender their wills for their leaders. Irkens have this neat little psychological perception that the greatest thing in the universe is the Irken Empire, and the most central aspect of their identity is being Irken. Thus, the only way to make _themselves_ greater is to make the _Empire _greater, and they'll sacrifice everything to bring it, and by extension them, glory. The way to defeat them, then, is to show them times the Irken Empire blundered, destroy both their nationalism and their egos, and then hit them with the moralistic arguments."

"That's pretty manipulative."

"He's a scientist, I'm a diplomat, of _course_ we're being manipulative."

* * *

Lir and Vem were sitting in the Bihar's living room, sipping their drinks awkwardly over the sound of their hosts' almighty row. It had started with whispers and quietly but quickly said words indiscernible through the wall between them. The argument had gained pace and volume, some ominous words and phrases like "-dead!" and "What do you want me to tell them?" carrying through, until Raj lost control and started yelling full volume in Sanskrit, followed shortly thereafter by Helen in Classical Greek. They were talking so fast and in such strange dialects that even the most fluent of translators would have curled up and cried.

Lir coughed, and looked down at his feet. Vem hummed the _Invader's_ _March_ quietly while looking in every direction but the door. The silence grew unbearable, especially considering how noisy it was, so Lir decided to start up a conversation.

"So…" He began, and then the conversation sort of petered out.

There was more awkward, noisy silence.

"Is it bad that those two are upset?" Lir tried again.

"Is it _bad_?"

"Well, I mean, they're time travelers, right?"

"Yes. I think that's been established."

"So, you'd think it'd take something really nasty to get them worked up like that."

"Yeah. You would."

"I mean, if they can escape from almost anything coming their way… It'd have to be something pretty nasty that they couldn't get away from it…

"Yes. Unescapable."

"Right…So…"

"…Yep…"

And then they were back to square one.

After a few more minutes of fighting, Raj and Helen entered the room. Raj looked victorious, but was maintaining a wary distance from Helen.

"Is something wrong?" Lir asked nervously, immediately regretting it. Even he knew how stupid that sounded.

"Well…" Raj said, holding his arms behind his back and adopting the tone of a doctor with unfortunate lab results, "I have good news and bad news."

"Good news first." Vem said automatically.

"The good news is that we made it to Irk perfectly fine."

Vem and Lir exchanged glances. "I'm sorry," Lir said, "But that's what we were _expecting _to happen. It's not news. So, in effect, you have no good news for us."

Raj was too uncomfortable to get the next bit out after being shot down like that, and after a few false starts Helen gave up and said it herself: "We're on Irk, but it's about a week in the future, it's the middle of a war zone, and we have to dump you off in the middle of it."

Vem and Lir exchanged looks again, and then both began slowly moving away from the door.

"Look, I'm really sorry about this." Raj said, trying to be helpful.

"Not as much as we are." Lir said, slowly picking up a decorative lamp from the _Titanic_ and holding it like a baseball bat.

"Look, we saw our future selves in the future turtle, they sent us a video explaining that we have to do this to preserve continuity or whatever, and they sent us a video of you two getting dumped out of the turtle in about twenty seconds.

"Can't you figure out some smart-ass way of getting around this? Look, let's go up front and digitally create a video of you dumping us on the ground, record the same message, and then go back in time to tell yourselves." Vem said, reaching for a sturdy looking partially burnt piece of wood that had been part of humanity's first campfire hanging on the wall.

"Well, we though about that, but the turtle is the most advanced computer in existence. It can instantly recognize any sort of faked video from another computer, and it recognizes its own work. The turtle verified this video as authentic."

Lir nodded thoughtfully, "Do you still have that video on the computer?"

"Yes."

"How about we send _that_ file back in time as our transmission. It'd look exactly as authentic as when you received it, because it'd be the same file as you received."

Helen sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Lir, that's absolutely ridiculous."

"Why?"

"You can't just make a loop like that!"

"Why not?"

"Because, well… Because! Where would the video even come from?"

"Where did the _universe_ even come from?" Lir responded snidely, at this point interested solely in stalling.

"Well, we were there, and Raj insists he saw something purple. Look, Lir, you can't make a loop like that, because it would upset the laws of causality."

"How so? A message was transmitted and a message was received. It's the only foolproof way of making a video of something that obviously did not happen."

"Well Raj checked a history book and found out that, yes, we do have to dump you out of the turtle. In three seconds."

"Why don't we go into the future and change that book-"

Raj hit a button on the wall and Lir and Vem instantly found themselves on the surface of planet Irk, sans the stolen pieces of historical paraphernalia they had been wielding as weapons.

Lir kicked feebly at a rock with his seldom-used legs and swore, but Vem just closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. Home. She was home. The air on irk was thicker and bitingly cold compared to Earth, but she had felt hot and sick half the time she had been there. Irk had so negligible amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere that every lungful of Earthly air she breathed out probably doubled the amount present. Just nitrogen, methane, a few hint of other gases, and the feel of the sand a few inches below her feet… She was back.

Her happiness was abruptly interrupted by a laser beam shrieking into the hill she was standing on. Lir and Vem were thrown into the air, where, instead of falling, they leveled out and flew for their lives, hover belts ticking madly. They had landed on the outskirts of a massive battle, about twenty miles from Irk's capital city. Vem dared a glance back, and saw Irken assault mechs attacking some sort of… gigantic… furry… cyborg… thing, looming four hundred feet tall, and spewing lasers from its mouth. She closed her eyes, grabbed Lir's arm, and flew on, focused solely on her office and all the nice paperwork she should have refused to leave behind.

* * *

A week in the past, Dib had gotten off of Scly's ship upon the arrival of Scly. He found it somewhat strange that Dib and Reku were standing a few feet from the ship, looking out of breath and trying not to look at Scly or his ship, and especially not at the big 'Off-Limits' sign in front of it. Fortunately for them, Scly had just gotten engaged, and his thinking was a little fuzzy.

"Oh… Hey guys," He said, a little puzzled as to why they were in his private hangar, "What're you doing?"

"Just, uh, looking around. Nice place you got here, Scly." Reku said quickly.

Scly, being an Introi, had the nose of a predator and picked up the scent of guilt, embarrassment, and lying. But, being preoccupied with his love life, intergalactic war, and the nightmare of politics he was getting tangled in, there simply wasn't enough room left in Scly's mind for this sort of thing.

"Well…" He said, his mind deciding subconsciously to ignore what they had obviously been doing, "Have you shown him the Myrtians yet?"

Reku's beak pulled into what for the sake of an argument we will call a grin. "No way! You really got Myrtians?"

"The _Qrywmlythi_ _Vrlywlytg_ applied for a visitors' permit to the Earth years ago, and they came aboard this fleet as we were passing through the galaxy. They've been on Earth since the broadcast started, and we only just got them back up here. They were irritated they had to leave so soon, but they'd already traded half the songs in some guy's music shop for Elvis's latest al-"

"That's really great Scly!" Reku said very quickly, spinning Dib to face the door with one wing while rapidly making a slashing motion across his throat with the other, "Really great, why don't you take Dib here down to meet them? _Qrywmlythi_ _Vrlywlytg_ is a pretty big band."

"Reku, Dib's cool. We can tell him about El-"

"No, you can't! Strict confidentiality for the you-know-what!"

"Oh, the big comeback concer-"

"Shhh!"

"Come on, he's heard his name, the first syllable of 'album' and 'comeback concer-'. I think Dib's smart enough to piece it together."

Dib, who wasn't really interested in music, had stopped paying attention a while ago, and had not picked up on the big secret. He was still looking at the underside of Scly's spaceship, trying to puzzle out how it worked.

"Oh, I guess not. Come on, Dib, I think you're going to like this."

Myrtians were the first amphibious aliens Dib had yet seen, and internally he wondered how a sentient species had evolved from such a primitive phylum. They were about four feet tall, with purplish, slippery skin, a pale underbelly, a long tail that trailed them on the ground, a crest that sprung out from their head and neck, widely spaced yellow eyes, and a wide, grinning mouth with a frog-like sack below it.

Soldiers and technicians, here to be entertained by the famous band, were clapping and cheering for the band, who must've just gotten up. There were no instruments anywhere, something Dib had been looking forward to seeing.

"Hey, guys!" Scly said, leading Dib to a seat in the crowd as he waved at the band, "How's it goin'?"

"Fine. We just finished a song." The Myrtian said, in one of the clearest and most commanding voices Dib had ever heard.

"How 'bout playing something from Earth?"

"Sure! Hey, buddy, you from Earth?"

Dib looked down at his four limbs, torso, and lack of scales, looked up at the band, and said, "I think so."

The leader laughed, a booming, powerful laugh, that made everyone in the room start laughing. It was a sound laced with happiness, and it made you feel better just by hearing it.

"Okay, then, wise guy, what Earth song you wanna hear?"

"Uh…" Dib said, realizing that, between himself, Gaz, and Professor Membrane, he didn't really have any musical experience whatsoever. He fumbled, and said the only song his father had ever liked. "'She Blinded me with Science'."

The Myrtians nodded, the leader tapped his foot to the beat, and they sang the song.

They _sang_ the song.

They sang the drums, the techno instruments, everything. They sang the artist's voice so perfectly that Dib was sure it must be a recording. Nevertheless, looking at them sing, feeling the sounds coming from their mouths, sitting their in a crowd that was picking up the tune for the first time they'd ever heard it, he knew it was real. It was spectacular, brilliant, and more faithful to what the song was supposed to sound like than any recording Dib had ever heard. At the end, consummate music hater he was, he just had to clap with the rest of the audience

He stayed there for an hour clapping and cheering with the rest of the crowd through a collection of original songs and covers of earthly songs. After they got tired and left the stage, Dib and Scly stayed in the ship's rec room and discussed the applications of sonic warfare.

"You're kidding." dib said, sipping a surprisingly good cup of alien coffee.

"No, I'm not. They accepted a contract to write the most complicated musical piece in history and play it on the battlefield whenever the Meekrob decide to deploy their captured human army."

"And that will break their control?"

"According to this information from the Irken base down on Earth, yes. They captured a Meekrob trying to infiltrate the base in a stolen Irken body, and he lost control when they started playing complex rhythmic music. They can't handle all that information through a secondhand brain. I wonder what happened to that Meekrob anyways…"

* * *

Meanwhile, Chejii was still tied to a chair in the interrogation room in Zim's base. "Hello?…. Hello? Anyone there? Can I leave now?… If you don't say anything, that means I can go, right?… You don't have automatic lasers pointed at me or whatever, right?… Damn…"

* * *

"And, given the fact that Myrtians can sing in harmony with themselves, play instruments with their voices, and are generally the most musically inclined species in the known universe, I thought I'd get them to design a little song that could be used for military purposes."

Abruptly, over the intercom, a voice asked for Scly Evcoth to report to the bridge. Scly sighed. "Work again. Come on, let's go."

* * *

Hey guys. Really sorry it took so long, but we got a pool, and I'm going to China next Spring Break (Hell yeah!), and I was just playing computer games. We're approaching the end, so I'll try to pick up the pace a little bit.


	23. The Beginning of the End

Disclaimer: I DO own Invader Zim.

* * *

"_I knew it! You're an alien!"_

"_But how did you know! ? My disguise was perfect: I wore a _sweater-vest_!"_

-Angol-Mois, Lord of Terror, _Sgt. Frog_

* * *

Zim's Voot rose into the night sky, a starship capable of traveling further than every human being had ever gone combined in less than a second, a work of engineering and science capable of bringing intelligent life across the soul-sucking void of the cosmos, capable even of defying the speed of light in a way more meaningful than a tachyon or a video of a cat jumping into a box ever could.

It had to swerve out of the way to avoid getting plowed over by the Meekrob cruiser.

"_N'ch'kl'cp_!" Tenn swore in the universal language of road rage, honking at the ship's receding backside (with a 'How's my driving?' bumper sticker written in Meekrob). Zim was curled up in a fetal position on the floor, glassy-eyed and moaning as his PAK's logic circuits tried to process what his brain simply could not. Boiling down the situation into computer code only made it worse, as the computer had to quantify and confront her looming superiority to Zim.

Every Irken PAK has an internal priority meter which quantifies what in the universe is most valuable to the Irken. The Empire's value is standardized as 100, and the Irken's other priorities are quantified in relationship to this: Usually the Irken themselves had a score of about 50, with nothing else even approaching 30. Zim's self-worth registered as a shocking 125, either the result of a defective PAK with mind-conditioning problems, or an Irken who was so egotistical on his own that mind-conditioning wasn't effective. In Zim's case, probably a little of both.

_Tenn's_ value to Zim was a never-before recorded 186, much more than his own self-worth and nearly _twice_ that of the Irken Empire. The PAK was simply unable to fudge these numbers, and presenting such a report to Zim would force him to face the logical conclusion that he would sell himself and the entire Irken race down the river for Tenn. The PAK's mental functions simply shut off, sparing Zim from the final realization, but leaving him hopeless, confused, and incapable of action.

Now that they were getting out into space, however, Tenn needed Zim to come up and fly the ship, which didn't seem to be happening anytime soon.

"Zim?" She tried tentatively, aware how fragile her pilot's psyche was, "We're past orbit."

No response.

"We need to get past the blockade, Zim."

He curled up a little and just stared at the wall.

"Zim, please, I need you to-"

Zim got up immediately and walked over to the control console. His eyes still looked glazed and his antennae hung limp, but he began working the controls quickly and smoothly. As weirded out as Tenn was being piloted by a more-crazy-than-usual Zim, she felt a faint glimmer of pride that he responded when she asked him personally. The glimmer was quickly doused when she thought, _Why do I care what Zim thinks?_, was restored with, _Well, he's an egotistical maniac who praises himself at every conceivable opportunity, so his respect is hard to get., _and was knocked down again with _Yes. You have managed to acquire the respect of a maniac who blew up everything he touched back on Irk, and can't destroy so much as a single city on Earth. Way to go, Tenn_.

She became aware that, while Zim was piloting the ship with a level of competence he had never displayed before in his life, he wasn't paying much attention to the screens or window. His eyes were focused on her antennae, which struck her as wrong in some way, but she didn't know why.

"Zim," She said, feeling inexplicably irritated, "Quit looking at my antennae. My eyes are down here."

Zim blinked, then looked away hurriedly, blushing to a deep green, feeling as though he'd done wrong, though he didn't know why. Tenn sat there wondering why she had snapped at Zim, and why he was looking in the first place. Two and a half millennia of no dating experience whatsoever was beginning to take its toll, and without the Control Brains to block out such unproductive emotions, the situation was becoming horrendously awkward.

As Zim felt his eyes begin to slide to the top of Tenn's head again, he noticed a small metal object come streaking out of the atmosphere behind them.

"Computer, zoom in and enlarge image of metallic object at 195 degrees." He said, turning the ship to a course that would safely take them away from the Earth so he could watch. The computer whirred, and a second later an image of GIR, blasting out of the atmosphere at Mach 6, appeared on the screen.

"Isn't that your robot?" Tenn asked as Zim's mouth fell open in surprise. Given what a disaster GIR usually was (the special abilities the Tallests had obviously programmed him with were not being used for some reason), that he would be willing to follow his master into the depths of outer space made Zim proud.

And then GIR slammed face-first into one of the nearby Natrian craft, and Zim realized he was just being stupid.

Actually, GIR's little accident proved fortuitous to the Invader: The ship would have captured Zim had it not been nearly broken by the little robot, and GIR would soon play an important role within the Natrian fleet.

Zim, however, dismissed the event as irrelevant, and turned his attention to the Natrian fleet, eyeing them for when they caught on to the Voot's obviously Irken construction. He couldn't tell what was going on inside those ships, but he knew that as soon as they put it together he'd have to gun it and hope they were far enough out.

* * *

On the command bridge of the largest vessel, a technician was analyzing the small object showing up on their sensors: It was registered as a Natrian vessel, but it wasn't in formation and appeared to have left the surface of the planet instead of a hangar. He sent a message to it asking what it was doing, and it immediately accelerated away from the planet.

"Um… um… sir?" He asked nervously, "There seems to be a ship traveling away from the planet… I don't know what to do."

Reku sighed. He had more important problems than this. "Then ask it what it's doing."

"I did, sir. It didn't respond."

Reku frowned. "What squadron is it in?"

"It's not in any of our squadrons. I don't think it's even a military vessel."

Reku leaned over the technician's shoulder, examine the craft. "It's got a Natrian I.D. code… What ship has that registration number?"

"I'm checking that, sir… It's registered to 'FIRSTNAME: Zim, LASTNAME: Pain in the-'"

"_Hisrig_!" Reku swore, grabbing his communications pad, thankful that he had registered the Voot personally.

* * *

A second later, his voice came through the Voot's speakers: "Zim, you little tick, turn that ship around!"

Zim looked to Tenn for directions, but she just shrugged. He turned back to the microphone, and, in what little Mentii he knew, tried, "_Twiwip, gisrih rih gisiv jifivvm vizig?_"

There was a second or two if silence, and then Reku said in a tired tone, "You just said, 'Hello, this is the queen eat.'"

Zim winced. "I meant _jivivm vishig_."

"Which doesn't mean anything at all. Is Tenn there?"

Zim sighed, and turned the operation over to Tenn. "Hello," She said, "This is Commander Tenn of the Irken Armada, I am currently escaping from you and it looks like you aren't gonna catch me. What did you want to talk about?"

"I see we're still on 'No B.S.' Knock it off, Tenn, this wasn't part of the deal."

"Oh, yes, the deal that started with you invading our Empire."

"No, the deal that started with _you_ invading everyone else."

"Don't play the morality card, alien, you only beat us in a sneak attack."

"Oh, I'm so sorry, I should have remembered that throwing your loyal troops at an enemy until most of them are dead was the 'honorable' tactic. And it's not like _who_ you declare war on has any significance. I'll be sure to bring that up in my next philosophy seminar."

"Losers only criticize it because they lost."

"And you lost to our sneak attack."

Tenn didn't have a response for this one, so she just folded her arms and shot back, "Yeah, well, every second you spend arguing with me, we get farther away from you."

"Oh, that's going to go over real well with your soldiers Tenn: They got beaten, they got captured, their commander told them to _give up_, which conveniently provides her with an excuse to escape."

Tenn froze. She panicked tried to think of a comeback, but only managed stuttering starts before sinking back into speechless horror.

"Yep, what a dishonorable exit for the once-great Invader Tenn…" Reku said, aware he'd finally hit home, "First she loses her base to a shipping mistake, then she gets captured by the enemy, then she has to be _rescued by Exile Zim_, the worst defective in the history of the Empire, then she lets her and her fleet get captured _again _by different aliens, then she _runs away_, again with _Exile Zim_."

"B-But… That's not what happened!"

"It's what the troops will _think_ happened. And that's really all that matters. Of course, I could try telling them you had a very good reason to run away. Do you think that will help?"

Tenn slumped back in her chair as Zim turned off the transmission. Irkens were proud creatures, and a rising wall of shame was looming in front of her. Yes, the smart, responsible thing would be to escape back to Irk, but if she did, her name would be dirt for all eternity. Zim had already been taken off the list of acceptable Irken smeet names ('Well, of course,' Zim had said, 'Who'd want to grow up in the fantastical shadow of me?'), and she imagined Tenn being added just below it. The Traitor and the Lunatic, escaping from danger together.

"No." She said aloud, standing up in the small craft, "No. I'm through compromising."

"Tenn?" Zim asked, "What are you doing?"

"We have to turn around Zim. I'm not running away."

"Well, _I_ am! Besides, it's not running away! It's strategic withdrawal: It's not cowardly, it's smart!"

"Zim, you don't have to come if you don't want to."

"Yes I do. Even if you _did_ convince me to take you back, then they'd just capture me with you!"

"I could probably make some kind of deal-"

"Like the ones you guys keep breaking? Besides, I wouldn't let you leave even if you _could_ work something out."

"Zim, I'm your Commander-"

"And, Commander, _I_ am _ZIM_."

Tenn smiled a little. Zim was back to his angry, egotistical self, which was good, in a sense. Still, she wasn't going to give in. She bent over, unbuckled herself, and pressed the 'Eject' button on the dashboard. Exposed to the vacuum of space, their PAKs created force-field helmets as all the air rushed out of the ship.

Zim leapt forward and tried to grab Tenn's hand, but the air sucked her out of the Voot before he could get a good hold. He jumped out as fast as he could, and grabbed the ship with one hand and Tenn's arm with the other.

"Tenn!" He yelled, transmitting his voice via radio through the airless void of space, "I can't let you go! The Tallests told me to bring you back to Irk safely!"

"The Tallests are dead, Zim! I'm your Commander, and I'm ordering you to let go!" She responded.

"You don't know that they're dead!"

"Yes I do!"

"Nuh-uh!"

"Zim, let go this instant! Even if the Tallests _we're_ alive, my orders would supersede them because of the wartime circumstances!"

"… Nuh-uh!"

"Zim, you went to the Academy, you know this! Look, the Tallests are either dead or incapacitated, which means Vem is acting Tallest. She passed all authority on to Lir, who passed it on to me! I AM YOUR TALLEST, NOW LET GO!"

"SCREW THE TALLESTS, _I_ DON'T WANT YOU TO GO!"

Tenn stared. That was the single most blatantly treasonous, traitorous, illegal statement she had ever heard out of anyone's mouth, and it thrilled her to no end. Zim, the most zealous, obsessively loyal Irken in existence, valued her beyond the Tallests. She blushed with pride and sudden affection for Zim that she was fully conscious was stupid. Still, she had made up her mind.

She extended her PAKs mini-rockets, and blasted directly at Zim, knocking him back into the Voot, and then flying around it to head for the Natrian fleet. Zim was about to turn the ship around to chase her, but the ship's autopilot had gotten it beyond the pull of the Earth's gravity and launched him into light speed before he could stop it.

"Goodbye, Invader Zim." Tenn said quietly, using her temporary status to promote him back up to his chosen profession. She then turned and flew towards the Natrian ship.

* * *

"Beijing, Shanghai, three from Tokyo-Yokohoma, Hong Kong, Singapore, Los Angeles, San Fransisco, and one from Minneapolis-St. Paul." The technician read, as Scly massaged his temples and sighed. "All other ships didn't get away before we caught them, or they simply didn't try to launch."

"Okay," Scly said, aware of the political nightmare this would be, "How many were on each one?'

"A million each, but the last one took off after a fourth of the loading time."

"How many humans do the Meekrob have?"

"9,245,000."

"Oh, _God_."

That was an army. That was more than an army, that was dozens of armies, so many armies it would be impossible to defeat them, not even counting how many robots the Meekrob had. Besides, they couldn't even fight the Meekrob if they deployed the human army, because any action against them would necessarily be targeting innocent civilians.

Scly sighed, then walked back to the stress room the Introi always put near the bridge. It was a soft white, padded room, with soothing music playing over the speakers. On the wall was a cabinet filled with baseball bats and automatic weapons, and the press of a button could fill the room with fragile vases or moving targets. Scly just lay down on the floor, stared at the ceiling, and screamed bloody murder for forty five seconds.

He came out with a smile on his face, and rubbed his hands together excitedly. "So," He said hoarsely, "We need to figure out a way to capture, but not destroy, those Meekrob ships before they reach their target, which I'm willing to bet is Irk. Any suggestions?"

The crew remained silent. Scly was tired, crabby, and the endorphins from getting engaged were wearing off. He tended to get a little full of himself when he was upset, so the crew just decided to let him talk to himself.

"Nothing? No? No help from any of you at- Oh, jeez, I'm getting worked up. Sorry. I'm just gonna go sleep for a few hours."

The crew members let out a collective sigh of relief as soon as Scly left the room. When his favorite team lost the Galactic Cup, Scly hadn't been tolerable for days.

Reku stepped back into the position of command. "Alright everyone, I think we're just about done here. Leave a ship to continue the negotiations with Earth, but get everyone else out of here and back to the main fleet in an hour."

Reku left the bridge, and headed to the elevators. They had all the Irkens on board, and a crew of electricians were standing by to begin modifying their PAKs. He was going to supervise the project so it could be done quickly and safely. Most of that consisted in telling the 'professionals' which was a brainwashing device and which was a USB port, but it came with the territory. What that territory _was_ he had long ago forgotten. Something to do with politics.

He was distracted from his thought by a tapping noise from one of the windows. He walked up to it, and was surprised to see Tenn floating outside, mouthing _Let me in._

Reku stared at her for a few moments, then sighed and started walking down to the emergency hatch. Yep: Definitely politics. Nothing else could possibly be so complicated.

* * *

IT LIVES! Sorry, everyone, but I've had to deal with school, and distracting videogames, and learning Japanese, so I haven't had a lot of time for writing. Sorry if this one was messy, but I've gotta start moving several plotlines towards the ending.

Onwards, to Irk!


	24. The 24th Chapter

"_The Meekrob are a funny race: They are the most pathologically hateful species we have yet to encounter, the most convinced of their superiority and right to rule, and yet, in their everyday communication they use a language of us mere fleshies. The Meekrob, whenever they emerge from their silicon homeland, find themselves in need of a language to speak with in this world of air and sound waves, and so they have universally adopted the language of the N'chlp, a species we have conquered and subjugated, as their own. Some genius decided to give the N'chlp the wonderful nickname 'screwhead' and force them to ship packages for us, but the Meekrob don't seem to care. They translate their own language of electromagnetic pulses and flashes into N'chlp, converting their very names into a form we can understand. They are willing to sully their glorious tongues just so we will have some way of addressing them as master."_

-Tallest Miyuki

* * *

Metao paced back and forth in his office, something he only did when he wanted to make a point. The Meekrob did not make meaningless movements like other species, and they appeared unnaturally still in everyday conversation with other peoples. It took years of training to make a Meekrob infiltrator capable enough to bite his stolen fingernails without looking like he was thinking it through. Metao paced for the benefit of his underlings, who he wanted to remind how irritated he was.

Metao was frustrated, not only at the current situation, but at the universe in general. Why couldn't the fleshies see how superior the Meekrob were? Metao was a learned energy-thingy, and from his understanding of lesser cultures, he knew that the Meekrob matched, in almost every way, the fleshy conception of a God: Powerful, practically immortal, non-physical, with the power to rule minds, the Meekrob matched every primitive concept of the divine. Metao realized that, obviously, the Meekrob _were_ Gods, but because they only ever interacted with other Meekrob, they thought themselves less. Put them around other, weaker beings, and they realized who was superior.

Not too superior, unfortunately: Metao had grossly underestimated the average Meekrob's ability to control human hosts. Your average, well-trained Meekrob soldier could only exert the control necessary to make a human serve as foot soldiers over two hundred and fifty individuals at a time. This was good, but not good enough: The Meekrob had never been a very numerous race, and there simply wasn't enough of a military to control that many humans. Metao had only 100,000 soldiers under his control, basically the entire Meekrob military, and now he had to devote 37,000 of them to containing the humans. The rest of his fleet was undermanned and just barely making it into space. There was no way they could survive a combat situation unless they found a way to maximize a Meekrob's ability to control humans.

So Metao had sent out his infiltrators, scouring the surface of the earth for something he could use against the humans, something that would make them docile and his own troops strong. Some cultural phenomenon, some unifying force, some factor that could unite humanity under the Meekrob. He had been toying around with an idea for a combined religion/organized sport when they found something much, much better. It was not a thing or an idea, but a person, an exceptional human, one with boundless intellect and a zeal for all of humanity, with the mental facilities necessary to serve as the perfect Meekrob transistor. They could channel his passion for his species, his intellectual might, his sheer, unstoppable optimism to bring a thousand humans under the control of a single Meekrob.

He would have been perfect, and Metao had almost sent out the order to his troops to capture this human by any means possible, but he had been advised not to by his lieutenants, who feared the human might not be a simple capture. There was evidence linking him to the 'Invasion' of Irken Exile Zim, and the Meekrob were jittery about alerting humanity to the presence of aliens in their world. They weren't clear on what Zim meant for their plans, exactly, but he was an unknown variable upon whom they did not wish to take a risk: There was evidence suggesting that other humans knew of Zim's presence, and certainly their targets entire family was involved to some extent. So they had left the human alone for the time being, biding their time and checking for threats, until Metao felt confident enough to capture him. And then an entire Irken army dropped on their heads, which set plans back by weeks. When the Natrians showed up, Metao decided the humans couldn't possibly get any more aware of aliens then they already were, and he had given the order to finally apprehend the human. Unfortunately, he disappeared almost immediately.

Needless to say, Metao was nonplussed.

Now he was faced with a difficult decision: He and a select group of officers could remain on Earth and hunt for the missing fleshy, or they could cut their losses and pull out with the fleet. Every hour they remained on Earth, there was a greater chance they would be discovered, which would mean the end of the campaign, and, with it, the Meekrob Empire. However, if he left without the human, it would be nigh impossible to carry out the campaign when they _did_ make it to Irk. He had decided to stay behind until they found their ace in the hole, but all their searching had revealed nothing, and Metao was getting frustrated.

"So," He said to the line of officers, who hovered still, hoping to avoid his attention, "You still have not acquired Membrane. Do any of you have any idea what that means for our plans?"

The row of officers Metao had called into his room stood stock-still and silent. If Metao honestly wanted their opinions he would have asked for them in a private, discreet memo. He just wanted them here as a sounding board for his rage.

"Nobody? No one at all? It means we don't _have_ any plans, everyone. It means we have a hundred thousand soldiers, and we are planning to go up against billions of Irkens without any reinforcements whatsoever. It means that we, the Illustrious Meekrob Empire, are going to have to come to _terms_ with the Irkens, and will probably have to pay some humiliating amount of fleshy money so we are not destroyed. And, given that these are the Irkens, they'll probably blow something up anyways. Unless somebody can think of a way to get Membrane, I guarantee you, every single person in this room will be…" He paused meaningfully, "…Dishonorably discharged."

The Meekrob remained stoically silent, but they knew that Metao's threat had weight. The Meekrob, as a species, were a little overexcited about this whole 'Imperialism' thing (and Stuff With Capital Letters in general), and they had enthusiastically incorporated capital punishment into the legal system.

"Now," Metao said, in a businesslike tone that announced the fuming was over and they could get down to business, "Do we have any leads? Nvii, did your spy turn anything up?"

Nvii, the head infiltrator, shook his head (or would have, if he wasn't Meekrob), and said, "Chejii wasn't able to send us much information before we lost contact with him. Apparently he was captured while inside the enemy base."

Metao stayed silent for a few seconds, then said, in a deathly quiet tone, "I believe you are mistaken. No fleshy could ever capture a Meekrob soldier. Chejii has obviously defected."

Nvii stared in confusion, exchanging quick glances with his other officers, wondering what Metao was talking about. "Chejii was a little dense, sir," Nvii said, "That's why we assigned him to work with the low creatures. But he was always highly loyal to Meekrob. I think it is much more likely that-"

"No meatbag fleshy could outwit even the least intelligent Meekrob!" Metao exploded, whirling on the officer in rage, "He has gone over to their side because he was weak-willed, and exchanged his duty for physical temptations! He is a traitor, and as we speak he is probably informing the enemy of our intentions. Clearly that's how the human got away: They couldn't have caught on by themselves. End of discussion."

Cowed, Nvii backed up a foot. Few things are worse than a raving lunatic. _Working_ for a raving lunatic was one of them.

"An enemy vessel was detected in the area shortly before we lost track of Membrane," Another officer offered, to placate Metao, "It's possible that they brought him with them when they started chasing our vessels out of the system."

Metao nodded, "There we go. A lead. I think it's obvious to everyone here that we won't find Membrane on earth anytime soon, and by the time we do, it will be too late and he won't be of any use to use anyways. We'll have to flee Earth as soon as possible, and try to track him down among the enemy fleet. If we can capture him, Irk will be ours and the rest of the Irken Empire will fall in a matter of weeks. These outsiders cannot withstand our combined force, and then we shall rule _three_ great Empires. There will be nothing in the universe capable of resistance, and Meekrob will rise to her rightful place among the sentient species."

Meekrob were not given to cheering, but they did glow a little brighter as Metao dismissed them and they left the room. Once they were gone, Metao sagged with exhaustion, and began floating to his personal shuttle. He wasn't going to show weakness in front of his soldiers, but he really needed to 'eat' something.

_Check_, he thought to his enemies. He wondered how the mind leading the Natrians would respond.

* * *

The mind leading the Natrians was currently asleep, so Reku got the news that they had prisoners.

"God," He said, wondering how Scly dealt with this, "Yes, I _know_ we have prisoners. I just led them down to the processing center."

"No, we have new prisoners." The Introi lieutenant said, as tired as anyone else on the ship, and a little snappish, "One we found in the Irken base-"

"Skoodge?"

"No, sir, another Irken we found tied to a chair in some sort of interrogation room. Skoodge came up without a problem."

"And have we taken him up to the ship yet?"

"No sir, he's… He seems to be a little dangerous." The Introi said, holding up a file.

"I'll get to that. How about the other one?"

"He- _It_ crashed into one of our ships out on patrol. It's some kind of robot."

"Okay, I don't know anything about robots. Just put it in a holding cell until Scly wakes up. What about the other one?"

"The other prisoner is still in the room where we found him. He seems to be hysterical and suffering from extreme paranoia. One of the soldiers snuck a look at him in _tizinniz_ vision- Sorry, you probably don't know what that means."

"I've been living around Introi my entire life. I know what _tizinniz_ means." Reku snapped, irritable himself. Introi were capable of shifting their spectrum of observable light into high-frequency, high-energy wavelengths such as ultraviolet and gamma, an ability they called _tizinniz_. "_Racist_." He added, in Aurus.

The lieutenant had a deadpan look. "_I speak Aurus_."

"And you have a terrible accent." Reku said, taking the file from his subordinate's hands as the Introi rolled his eyes. An ultraviolet spectrum picture inside showed Chejii in his stolen body, glowing brightly in an otherwise black room.

"That doesn't look good." Reku said, flipping through some more photographs, all of which showed Chejii glowing like a candle. "Do we know what a Meekrob would look like in a stolen body?"

"Yes sir, we downloaded some files from Zim's base. This appears to be a match."

"Alright, send a special forces unit down there, and take precautions so he doesn't escape. We're almost certainly at war with the Meekrob too." Reku was getting a headache: He couldn't juggle so many wars at once. This was probably why Scly drank so much coffee. "I'm gonna… Go help with the prisoners or something."

The soldier nodded, and walked off with what among the Introi passed for a march (which, of course, looked ridiculous for any species taller than it was long), and Reku ambled towards the elevators with a sigh. It was tough at the top: No one seemed to know where you were supposed to be. At least, nobody _told _you where you were supposed to go.

He arrived in the room set up to receive the new prisoners, to find the newly-freed Irkens all in various states of panic. Some fiddled with their hands, talking extremely quickly in hushed voices to their friends, who were failing at suppressing the urge to hyperventilate, some wandered the room in aimless panic, while others slowly dragged themselves over to chairs and just plopped down. Every few seconds, another Irken would stumble into the room, eyes widening as they began thinking _What the hell…_

Skoodge seemed to be taking it the best. He just sat in the corner, hands folded in his lap as he looked thoughtfully off into the distance. Reku felt a pang of sympathy for all of them, rudely awakened from their nationalist dreams to the nightmare of reality. He really wished he had something important-looking to read: Several Irkens were beginning to stare at him, hoping for some sort of guidance.

A crunching noise from his right caught Reku's attention, and he turned to see Tenn punching the wall as hard as she could, raw fury in her eyes, crumpling the plastic composite most of the ship was made of.

"I see you're taking it well." Reku said, walking over to stand by Tenn as she increased the rate of punching.

"Those vicious-"CRUNCH"-evil little-"CRUNCH"-_Klim'ni-" _CRUNCH_"-ilkinaitr'bthino Irkei vittlim KLAID'N!_" She screamed in Irken, hitting the wall as fast and as hard as she could.

"Okay, that's nice, but maybe you should just take it easy on the wall-"

"NOBODY MAKES A FOOL OF ME!" Tenn screamed, whirling on Reku and catching the attention of everyone in the room, "NOBODY STRINGS ME ALONG FOR YEARS ON FALSE HOPE AND LIES AND MANIPULATION, NOBODY MANIPULATES ME, NOBODY MAKES ME MISERABLE WHEN I FAIL AT ANOTHER ROUTINE LITTLE GAME OF PLANETARY CONQUEST! I AM NOBODY'S SERVANT! I AM NOT A TOOL!"

"Well, not anymore," Reku said, fearing a little for his safety but still deciding to rile her up so she'd help bring down the Empire, "Question is, Tenn: What are you going to do now?"

Tenn breathed heavily, her tiny form shuddering with rage. She glanced at the numb, lost Irkens, saw their utter helplessness, and felt the red tide of rage rise even higher. "I'm going to find the Tallests, I'm going to hunt them down wherever they are in the universe, and if they're dead, in going to go there and bring them _back_-"

"Well, actually, Tenn, the Tallests didn't really do this. They just sort of fit into the existing system. In a way, they're victims too."

Tenn stopped, not believing what she was hearing. "This was going on _before _Red and Purple?" She said, feeling her fury soar to new, unbelievable heights. "How long have they been doing this to us?"

"Well, we can't know for sure, but we believe the Control Brains have been doing this for the last two and a half millennia."

Everyone in the room at the time later swore they heard a little snapping sound. Tenn was beyond hatred. She was beyond anger. Her face settled into an emotionless calm that somehow conveyed more loathing than anything else ever could.

"I am going to kill them." She said flatly, not threatening, not elaborating, just a simple statement of objective truth. Sheer malice radiated off her in waves, and her sudden calmness only made her more dangerous.

"You are going to assist me in this." She said, turning to stare Reku straight in the eye. The bird of prey, at least four times her size, felt raw, absolute fear rise up in his chest.

"How soon can you get us to Irk?"

"We…We can get there in a week. We know some shortcuts." Reku said, privately adding _Good God, what have I done?_

"Good. Ensure we are able to travel as soon as possible." Tenn said matter-of-factly, walking past Reku and into the rest of the ship.

The Irkens turned to stare at Reku for a few seconds, then followed the new beacon of authority into their captor's ship. Eventually it was only him and Skoodge in the room. He turned towards Skoodge, a lost expression on his face, but the Irken just shrugged.

"You wanna go get some coffee?" Reku said, falling back into familiar territory.

"Sure."

* * *

Dib, meanwhile, was having the time of his life. He had a highly advanced alien computer in his hand (stolen), he was learning about the universe as fast as he could possibly cram the information into his oversized head, and he was pretty sure some octopus thing trued to eat him. There was no Skool, no Zim, nothing but the cosmos stretching before him in all their wonder.

Which is why he was also keeping an eye on everything. Good things don't just happen like this: At some point Zim would probably jump out with a laser, or he'd wake up to find himself in a giant simulator room, or Gaz would tear through the wall yelling about her cereal. The paranoia didn't detract from his happiness: Dib had spent too much of his life paranoid to let it get him down. In fact, happy moments were all the more precious for the anxiety.

Dib was vaguely aware that he should probably get help.

He was sitting in the ship's cafeteria, eating things which, in all fairness, should have made him sick (not that he could say anything better about Skool lunches), and grinning like a maniac, when the explosion rocked the ship.

"Yep," He said, between mouthfuls of sugary Introi desserts, "Called it."

As various military personnel streamed past him, Dib just stayed put and continued eating. If something bad was happening, he didn't need to be there, and if something bad was happening to _him_, it could drag its lazy butt over here and find him itself.

And it did, in a sense. One of the ubiquitous officers (you didn't find many average soldiers on a spaceship) ran up to him, somewhat surprised at his calm. "Mr. Membrane-"

"Is _not_ my last name."

"-There's an emergency on the ship. We need to bring you somewhere safe, so if you'll just follow me-"

"No thank you," Dib said, returning to his food.

"…What?" The Introi said, feeling a little put off, "I'm here to save you."

"Right," Dib said, "And I assume someone is attacking us?"

"Yes, but I-"

"If you'll let me finish," Dib said, raising his index finger in the air, "If someone is attacking the ship, everyone who isn't a marine or combat robot will be going to the designated safe areas, right?"

"Yes."

"And I bet the paths to those safe areas are well-labeled, easy to see?"

"Yes…"

"So either the enemy is interested in taking the ship, in which case they wouldn't bother with a civilian like me anyways, or they want to take _prisoners_, in which case I definitely do not want to be up there in a room clearly labeled prisoners."

"But… You can't just stay in the cafeteria…"

"Why not?"

"Because… Because…"

"Because no one's thought of it yet, that's why. Go away."

The officer considered this, then sat down next to Dib. "I'm not a soldier, might as well stay here." He said, patting his uniform, "Damn it, I can't find my computer."

"Corporal Macai?"

"Wha-? Yes." The Introi said, surprised Dib knew his name.

"Here you go", Dib said, handing the thin little space-computer he'd lifted from the Officer's lounge to his new companion.

"Thank you…" He said, accepting the device and wondering why the hell Scly wanted these things on the ship.

Suddenly, a screen bult in the wall flared to life, revealing the glowing fave of a Meekrob soldier. "Dib Membrane-" The harsh voice began.

"That's not my name!" Dib yelled, without looking up.

"We demand your presence at the bridge immediately!" The Meekrob said.

Dib turned towards the Corporal, who shrugged. "I have no idea who that is." He said, "Probably a bad guy."

Dib nodded. "No thank you." He said to the speaker, fully aware that nobody but Macai could hear him.

"Since you refuse to come out, we must warn you that we will now break into your Designated Safety Bunker and retrieve you ourselves."

Dib gave Macai a victorious look.

A few pleasant minutes passed before the face came back. "Okay, Membrane-"

"Still not my name."

"You aren't in the Designated Safety Bunker, so we demand you reveal yourself immediately."

"Don't wanna."

"We are going to check all the security cameras until we find you-"

"Damn," Dib said with a sigh.

"There you are, Membrane! We found you: I can see you in the… Cafeteria… Why the hell are you in there! ?"

"It worked, didn't it?" Dib said, and this time the Meekrob were able to hear his response.

"Get up here right now!"

"No." Dib said with simple eloquence.

"Then we'll come down there and get you!"

"Then I'll just go to the escape pods." Dib said, gesturing off to his left, where an access hallway led to some of the aforementioned escape pods.

"We… We'll… We've got hostages! Come up right now or we'll kill your little friends!"

"I don't believe you. Besides, I don't know anybody on this ship."

"_We'll rig the whole ship to explode_!"

"Jeez, fine, I'll come down there. Don't get so worked up." Dib said with a sigh, taking some pleasure in infuriating the Meekrob further. "C'mon, Macai, let's go."

* * *

Yes, I know it's late. _Mea Culpa_. Hopefully I'll get the next one done sooner (No promises)


	25. Into the breach

"_The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also our enemies, probably because they are pretty generally the same people."_

-G.K. Chesterton, a man who knew what was going on

* * *

It was, as future historians would remember, the era when illusions were shattered. The human race was suddenly and uncomfortably exposed to the vastness of space, the Irken Empire's secret rulers suddenly discovered the painfully exploitable weaknesses inherent in their power structure, and everyone's basic assumptions about how the universe worked were challenged.

Take space travel, for instance. Dib had always assumed that being in a spaceship would be an uncomfortable, weightless, cold experience, like commercial air travel without the gravity. He quickly found, however, that Natrian ships had fully functional gravity, spacious interiors, and warm, humid air. His initial surprise that the Introi could afford these amenities was quickly put to rest by his improved understanding of both the Introi themselves and of post-spaceflight societies in general.

Spaceflight was a big deal to advanced civilizations: There were great profits to be made, and long periods of time to be spent in space, ensuring there was heavy investment in figuring out how to make the process as easy as possible. Early issues with weight and fuel costs had been quickly overcome with the development of highly efficient nuclear reactors and antimatter fuel, allowing the Natrians to move objects through space with relative ease. After that, it was a simple matter to build ships to be larger and much more comfortable than they otherwise would be. Another scientific development that had contributed greatly to interstellar comfort was the advent of synthetic gravitation technology, allowing travelers to avoid space sickness and disorientation, as well as preventing inconvenient and unsightly muscle atrophy (some travelers still opt for a gravity free ride, which is somewhat cheaper and much more fun).

Aside from those considerations, Dib had failed to take into account the needs specific to the Introi as a species: Much larger beings from a mostly tropical planet, the Introi felt the need for space and warmth more acutely than a human would. While Dib found the ships spacious and a bit too hot, they were cramped and cool by Introi standards. Had he been travelling on a civilian vessel, especially if it wasn't designed to accommodate other species, he would have found space travel to entail ninety-degree temperatures and intolerable humidity levels.

Of course, that would still be far preferable to walking towards his certain demise at the hands of alien energy ghosts.

Dib meandered slowly down the hallways, running his hand over the off-white plastic composite that made up most of the ship's interior. Whatever the substance was, it was lightweight, resilient and seemed to be a part of every Natrian spaceship he had been on. He regretted never asking Scly what it was or how they made it, considering he probably wasn't going to get another chance. The whole 'certain demise' thing was really a bummer.

Of course, it wasn't exactly _certain_ demise. It was _almost_-certain demise, which was worse, because it still probably meant he was going to die, but he had no idea how or when it was going to happen. So Dib took his own sweet time getting up to the bridge, knowing that the Meekrob wouldn't touch the prisoners for fear of losing their bargaining chips and losing Dib.

It did irritate them though: Every once in a while, a nervous, impatient voice would yell at him to hurry up over the intercom. Dib responded with a witty and incisive comment, such as '_You_ hurry up!' or 'Make me!', and once Macai had responded with _Thrip'nim_, a Mentii insult which roughly translates as 'Go home and ruminate on the philosophical nature of the universe with your pet _Ufihmizipv_, you knave', only much more obscene.

Still, Dib had to make his way down to the bridge eventually. He could stall, he could piss the Meekrob off, but he had to surrender eventually. He sighed.

"You guys have great walls, you know that?" Dib said, stopping to stare at the mysterious material once again.

"Huh?"

"And your windows!" Dib said, spinning to face the long stretch of transparent material that afforded the hallway a grand vista of the stars. "What are they made of? That can't be ordinary glass, can it?"

"I don't know, I'm not an engineer. What does that have to do with anything?"

"It's just cool." Dib said, turning back towards the bridge and marching dejectedly down the hallway. "I finally get into space, and now I'm probably going to die or something. This sucks."

Macai nodded, even though he had no idea what Dib just said. 'Sucks' is just a verb in Mentii, and carries no negative connotations. They continued walking down the hallway, Dib briefly considering an escape attempt, then rejecting it, Macai just watching Dib and thinking about how weird humans walked.

As they walked by one of the deserted break rooms, Macai suddenly started sniffing. "Who's making coffee?" He asked, turning to peer into the seemingly-empty room.

Dib sniffed as well, and there was indeed a faint whiff of alien coffee in the air. Coffee was another thing about space that surprised him: Practically every species he had ever encountered had some equivalent of a bitter-tasting hot drink that gave you energy. He had even found some in Zim's base once, although that was meant to be brewed in ammonia and gave humans hallucinations if they sniffed it. What an Easter that was…

Macai stuck his head into the room, peering around from the end of his long neck. He saw the coffee maker, silently pouring out a stream of black fluid into a cup. Aside from that, the room was empty. Just rows of tables, a few drink counters, and a closed food station. He closed his mouth and inhaled deeply, allowing his overly-developed predator nose to pick out the fainter smells in the air. The coffee's aroma was strong, but not overpowering: He could pick out that three Introi, an Aurus, and two Hydustar (another species of alien that constituted the Empire) had been in here about twenty minutes ago, when the alarms started. But there was something else he smelled, something he couldn't exactly place, but was familiar for some reason. A strange, faintly acidic smell layered heavily with synthetics and whiffs of oil.

He sniffed deeply, brow furrowed in concentration. What _was_ that? Dib wandered into the room, carrying his heavy human odor with him and making him lose concentration.

"Damn it…" Macai muttered in irritation, "Almost had it."

"What?"

"I'm smelling something weird in here. I can't exactly place it."

Dib sniffed a little. "I don't smell anything. You smell anything, Skoodge?"

There was a muffled curse from under one of the tables, and a second later Skoodge crawled out from underneath. "How'd you find me?" He asked in a frustrated tone.

"That was it!" Macai said, remembering suddenly. "That's what an Irken smells like! They introduced that to us a few weeks ago. How _did_ you find him, Membrane?"

"That's still not my name, and I saw him because the tables are taller than I am." Dib said, before turning to the Irken, who was dusting himself off after his journey to the mysterious and filthy underside of the table. "What are you doing here, Skoodge?"

"Hiding." He said, wiping his hands off on his shirt, "Me and this big bird guy came up here for some coffee, and then all these alarms went off. He was about to run off, but I thought that was dumb: We aren't soldiers or anything, so we can't go fighting them, and if they're looking for prisoners, the break room is the last place they'd check."

Dib smiled slightly, vindicated in his overthrow of thousands of years of battlefield conventions.

"'Big bird guy'?" Macai asked, "You mean an Aurus?"

"I don't know what you guys are called, I just got here." Skoodge said, before gesturing at the ceiling. "He's up there."

Dib and Macai both looked up at the ceiling, which was made up of more plastic-like panels and soft white light strips. One of the panels shifted, pulled up and away, and Reku stuck his head down. It was hard to tell with someone whose face was a beak, but he looked annoyed as well.

"Dammit, Skoodge!" He said, craning his neck around to glare at the Irken. "You blew my cover! What if these guys were enemies?"

"What would do if they _were_? Hide in the ceiling until they leave? They said they were gonna blow the ship up."

"I-I would have…ambushed them! Yeah, I would have jumped down on them while they were distracted, probably by laughing at _your_ lame hiding place."

"It took you five seconds to get the panel open, and you made a ton of noise just sticking your head out. How in the worlds could you ambush anybody? You wouldn't have lasted a second back on Devastis."

"Are you… Are you the High Council member?" Macai said in shock, as one of the leaders of his government awkwardly worked his way out of the small compartment he had wedged himself in.

"No, I'm not _the_ High Council member," Reku said as he plopped down on the floor gracelessly, "There are five of us. I'm _a_ High Council member, though."

Dib and Skoodge looked confused, but Macai smiled. Reku Lyti was well known in the Empire as the politician who started his speeches with 'So a guy walks into a bar…'

"Just to let you know, I voted for Rin." Macai said humorously. Lyti had beaten Svinal Rin by a huge margin in the last elections. Reku flashed Macai with his brilliant politician smile, and told him to go to hell.

The little party in the break room was broken up by the voice of a Meekrob officer coming in over the loudspeakers, loud, arrogant, and furious. "Membrane, you have exactly three minutes to get up to the bridge, or we will start eliminating hostages! You got that, you little… You little… Where'd he go?"

Dib turned to Skoodge, and mouthed, _He can't see us?_

Skoodge smiled, and gestured up at the wall. There was some kind of alien post-it stuck to the room's security camera, effectively making the room unobservable, without setting of alarms that a camera had been broken. Skoodge was an Invader, after all.

Reku waved his wings to draw their attention over to him. With as mischievous a grin as a beak could manage, he walked over to the wall, bent down to an air vent in the wall, and smoothly pulled it loose.

* * *

Meanwhile, up in the bridge, the Meekrob were panicking, rapidly falling into terrified chaos as they swarmed randomly around panels and computers that controlled the ship. Their situation was desperate and only getting worse: Seeing that the Natrian fleet was preparing to exit the system, Metao had ordered that at team of crack Meekrob commandos board the vessel immediately and find the human. They had simply gotten into one of their needle-shaped spacecraft, and, taking a page from the Natrians at their decisive victory at Vort, simply rammed their ship. It had worked, to the extent that they got inside safely, but the Meekrob had no intention of fighting a pitched battle in the ship, for fear of accidentally blowing it up and killing the human. So the Meekrob had split into two groups: One went to the bridge, using their superior agility, intelligence, and ability to fly through walls to get there before the Natrian marines and establish control over the ship. The other had moved down the corridors, following the clearly marked arrows to the Safety Bunker, where they held all the noncombatants hostage, forcing the soldiers and combat robots to surrender. They then triumphantly broke into the room, expecting to find their target cowering in the corner.

Except he wasn't.

That's when the Meekrob felt their first real panic on the mission: They had successfully taken control of the enemy ship, managing to avoid combat entirely as they took control of the whole situation, but the human wasn't where he was supposed to be. This wasn't according to plan, and they had no idea what to do.

While his fellow soldiers panicked, the Meekrob commander hurriedly checked the ship's video feeds, until he found the human, sitting in the cafeteria with another alien, eating. Just eating. That was sufficient to unnerve the entire attack force, to the extent that no one wanted to travel through the alien ship they barely understood to go and retrieve the target that didn't appear to be even remotely concerned with their attack. Running out of ideas, the commander just told the target to come up to the bridge himself-an absolutely ridiculous idea, when he thought about it-and then the human actually got up and_ started walking towards them_.

This sent the attack force into hysterics. Their intense training and the excitement of combat already had them on edge, and now this super-being who didn't fear death was calmly walking right towards them. Any sense of nerve they once had was rapidly falling apart, as the Meekrob found themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. They were stuck in an enemy vessel, barely able to work the controls, and only just managing to keep an eye on their target. They were surrounded by hostiles, all of whom knew the environment much better than they did, and with such pitifully short lifespans that a Meekrob mindset automatically assumed they'd have nothing to lose by bursting out and charging the bridge.

On the other hand, if they failed, then they'd have to answer to Metao, which was incomparably worse.

So the commander kept checking the video feeds every few minutes, making sure their target was moving towards the bridge, trying to act in control, but still painfully aware that the mission was in Dib's hands. If, for some reason, the human decided not to give himself up, they'd have to search the enemy vessel, all of them nervous, and try to hunt down the mystery fleshy that was the linchpin of their entire plan for universal domination.

Like everything else in the burgeoning Meekrob Empire, the strike force had been thrown together quickly and sloppily, as Meekrob tried to copy Irken and Vortian military concepts while relying heavily on Meekrobian ambition, skill, and the ability to fly through walls. Though they were gifted with incredible abilities and an inferiority complex a mile wide, the Meekrob thrust into space was a shoddy affair, loosely held together by a fresh-off-the-press official ideology and mostly sustained by sheer inertia. If the conquest faltered for any length of time, the whole thing would probably fall apart. Meekrob hadn't even been unified prior to the discovery of the vast, subjectable physical universe, and the new pan-Meekrobian identity was starting to split at the seams.

In short, the Meekrob strike force was barely-trained, high-strung, and one racist joke away from exploding into ethnoreligious conflict. They had all the training, of course, but a few months in the Imperial Meekrobian Training Corps couldn't change the fact that none of them really knew what they were doing, and the training had never even mentioned how to deal with this.

The commander flicked through the video feeds with increasing anxiety as Dib failed to show up on any of them. He vaguely wondered if the Natrians had some sort of system to track where everyone was on the ship, but even if they did he had no idea where it was or how to use it. All of the cameras showed empty hallways and rooms, excepting those that were knocked out when the Meekrob busted into the ship. He briefly wondered why an officer's lounge showed up blank, but he assumed it had somehow been damaged when they took the ship. Out of sheer desperation, he decided to try the intercom again.

"Membrane, I'm warning you! Get-get out of wherever you're hiding right now, or else… or else… or else!" He sputtered, uncomfortably aware that his soldiers were staring at the back of his neck. "Membrane! I'm gonna… count to ten! Erm. And you'd better be out by ten! Or… yeah. One… two…"

* * *

The Meekrob's ultimatum fell on deaf ears, or rather, on no ears at all, because Dib was no longer in the officer's lounge. He was quite unable to hear anything from the intercom, because he was now floating around in the ventilation system.

"Okay, this is cool and all," He said, spinning slowly in the pitch black, weightless metal tube that circulated air through the ship, "But why isn't there any gravity?"

"This wasn't designed so people could travel through it." Reku said about ten feet along the tube, where he was helping Macai through the vent. "You wanna pay the gravity bill for this thing, go talk to Scly."

"Shouldn't we be setting off alarms or something?" Skoodge asked, using one of his PAK legs to light the featureless walls, "Pretty big design flaw if someone can just use these things to get around unnoticed."

"Right," Reku said, pulling the vent back over the opening and leaving them with only Skoodge for light, "And ordinarily alarms would have gone off as soon as we took the vent off. But I know that this ship was designed by N-Labs Engineering, Scly's company, and he always puts something for himself in these things. I'm his friend, so I happen to know that you can get into any of his air vents without detection if you've got his ID card." Here he reached into the feathers around his neck and pulled out a well-concealed elastic band with a small metal sliver embedded in it. "Or a copy."

"Why did he do all this?" Dib asked, peering down the tunnel, trying to guess which way it was to the bridge, "So he could escape in emergencies like this? I suppose he probably deserves to be a little paranoid, but couldn't he think of something better than this?"

"Oh yeah, lots of stuff. It's been well established that you don't pull a knife on a biotechnician with infinite resources if you want to keep your lymph nodes." Reku sniggered a bit. "That whole day was funny. We just don't get assassination attempts like that anymore… Anyways, Scly mostly uses this for sneaking around the office when they want him in a meeting. He's also pulled off some pretty spectacular Saint J'Thai's Eve pranks with this, but mostly I think he set this up to show off."

Dib was vaguely aware that Saint J'Thai's Eve was some kind of Introi Halloween in the middle of the summer, which was a fun mental image, but he was starting to wonder how any of these weirdoes got elected, and asked Reku as such.

"That is a rude but entirely valid question." Reku said, flapping his wings carefully to achieve a strange, slow-motion flight along the length of the tunnel, "I guess the best way to explain this is to compare it to earth politics. You've noticed, I'm sure, that people in your country have been getting less and less interested in politics? Like the politicians are out-of-touch, self-centered, and that the system is sort of breaking down?"

"Yeah."

"Take that and multiply it by a millennia and a half of continuous government. Don't get me wrong, the Natrian system was very well crafted to start out, but by the time me and Scly were on the scene, every possible loophole and ambiguity in the laws had been exploited to its maximum extent, and voter turnout had bottomed out at roughly twenty percent. Then we show up, two young, energetic, funny guys straight out of college, and well… We put on a show. Scly had a track record of success with his bioengineering firm, and I had been the Quirmian sector senator for a few years, but what really got us elected was that we were relatable. We told jokes. We made fun of all the people who had bent the law to their own advantage, and we promised a good economy. Sooner or later, Dib, it all comes down to the economy."

The group had fallen into a drifting, befuddled procession in the weightless tube, following Reku as he made his way towards their destination. While the lack of up and down would have disoriented and sickened other beings, Skoodge and Macai had received zero-g training, and Dib and Reku were too wrapped up in their conversation to feel the nausea.

"So we came in, and we galvanized the electorate, spoke to the people, all that crap, and me and Scly won by huge majorities. Having no political background probably _helped_ Scly win the election: No unsavory partisan background, and the wonderful novelty of just having some random guy walk in off the street to win the High Councilship. Then, a term and a half later, with a great economy and an energized populace, we find out about the Irkens. The rest should be obvious." Reku sighed, "Sometimes I worry about him though. He's taken so well to this, I have to wonder what the job is doing to him. I mean, his legislation is brilliant, he managed to overhaul and simplify the entire tax code into a system that pulls in more money without all the complicated forms and stuff, but every once in a while I see things in his laws…" He sighed again. "I took a good look at them, lined them all up, and I think he's trying to beat the system. If you follow it carefully, he's basically cleaning up the system while making it impossible to gum up again, mostly by making new legislation nearly impossible. He's moving the Empire into a self-perpetuating, static system, without corruption or waste or… Or anything you find in a normal government, basically. I'm guessing all these laws will start swinging into action over the course of the next forty years. As far as I know, I'm the only one who's started to figure it out, and… I don't think I'll stop him."

"So… long-term… everything will stay the same?"

"As far as politics are concerned. We've pretty much hit the nail on the head with the system right now, and Scly's an engineer. He's also a bit of a perfectionist, and he absolutely will not allow anyone to mess with the system he's made. After this war, the Empire will colonize new planets, people will keep inventing and exploring, the laws will be upheld, corruption will cease to exist, and no one will ever try to use the law for their own benefit ever again. Permanent legal equality, perpetual growth. Unless the way of the worlds changes so much that the system can't work any more, the Empire will just keep going."

"But shouldn't you allow the possibility of change, so that a bad government can adapt and change itself?"

"Well, the thing is, bad governments never do. Here we are." Reku had stopped in front of one of the vents, and was peering through it carefully. "This one is in an emergency access terminal. If I can get in there, the system will recognize Scly's ID card and we can take control of the ship. Macai, get up here and help me push this off."

* * *

Yeah, I'm sorry this one took a long time. I was lazy, and there were a lot of plot elements that I tried to squeeze into one chapter, but that didn't really pan out. I'll try and get the next one up faster.


End file.
